Every side of war and conflict has its propagandists. To what extent are they culpable for the crimes of their political and military masters? Are they simply artists, under pressure, who get carried away? Or are they war criminals?

Angry Germans in cinemas in the early ‘40s would scream “Out with the Jews!” when director Veit Harlan’s Nazi propaganda film The Jew Suss (Jud Suss) was screened.

The propaganda movie - a Nazi distortion of an old 1925 novel about a Jewish nobleman - is loud, obtuse, melodramatic, poorly acted and unsubtle. It portrays basic Nazi stereotypes of Jews as being ugly, criminal, cunning, immoral, materialistic and threatening to Germans.

Harlan had one of his wives, Swedish actress Kristina Soderbaum, play the lead female role. The director took imprisoned Jews out of ghettos in Prague and Lublin to play Jewish extras.

SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler on seeing the finished product ordered: “I wish measures to be taken to ensure that all SS men and policemen see The Jew Suss during the winter.”

The film paved the way for Harlan, who went on to become the Third Reich’s most successful director, a well-heeled, feted, cigar-smoking man of influence with unlimited propaganda funds to produce Nazi blockbusters; one of which amazingly had 10,000 troops as extras near war’s end.

But the film has had repercussions lasting to this day, ripping apart Harlan’s often disbelieving extended family: “I belonged to a family which the Nazi era divided entirely into perpetrators and victims” says Jessica Jacoby, one of Harlan's granddaughters.

After the war, Harlan successfully fought off prosecution for aiding the Nazis, claiming he was coerced to produce Nazi propaganda. Controversially, he continued to direct movies and live a wealthy lifestyle, retiring to Italy’s island of Capri as an old, ill man, with still not the slightest hint of contrition.

In the SBS documentary by Felix Moeller, Harlan: In the Shadow of The Jew Suss, the director’s son, Thomas Harlan, himself a film director and author, describes The Jew Suss as a murder weapon: “Once you’ve seen the fruit of your work turned into a murder weapon, it is difficult to just say ‘I am a filmmaker and will carry on making films.’”

As Thomas Harlan speaks in his study, with a lovely courtyard outside, a small vase of dead flowers sits on his desk. He has spent much of his life condemning his father’s wartime actions.

Maria Korber, daughter of Harlan and his first wife Hilde Korber, appears as a tearful, shattered woman. She recalls Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s Minister for Propaganda, visiting her father at home and patting her on the head.

She first saw the controversial film in a closed showing at the age of 70: “I just wept in despair. And I couldn’t ever imagine that my father had really done this … it left me speechless.”

Some other members of the family refuse to believe Harlan’s culpability. “There must have been coercion for him to have made The Jew Suss," says another son, Caspar Harlan. “He was certainly not anti-Semitic. And he certainly was not a Nazi.”

Casper Harlan maintains that his father was apolitical. “He was an artist and just got carried away. But then, perhaps with a touch of reality, the son adds in retrospect: “What took place is not really forgivable.”

Even the shocked daughter Maria Korber is pulled in different directions: “He told me about his worries having made this film … But he loved Jews! He had loads of Jewish friends! He always maintained that he’d been forced and that he’d been under such pressure that he couldn’t refuse.”

Not every family member was shocked at seeing the film decades after it was made. One of Harlan’s granddaughters, a young woman, emerged from a modern day screening saying: “What’s so terrible about it?”