The Sin of Forgiveness

"The Sin of Forgiveness" is the sixth series' boldest hour — a Nazi-hunting story that ends with a kidnapping Bergerac lets happen. It begins with a man stealing population records, caught only because he stopped to help the man he knocked over. The man is Aaron Rosenbaum, a Nazi hunter, and he has come to Jersey because a report places Gustav Muller — pictured with Heinrich Himmler, an officer at Treblinka where Rosenbaum's entire family died — on the island. Rosenbaum is gentle, implacable and entirely willing to break the law. Bergerac, against Crozier's explicit orders, helps him off the record.

The suspect is George Draycott, a respected member of the island's music festival committee — a man who changed his name, has a German mother, and shares Muller's date of birth. Wolf Kahler plays Draycott with a placid, unshakeable respectability that the episode never allows to crack into confession. John Collee's script keeps the moral pressure on: Hungerford, asked about past crimes, argues you should forgive and forget; Crozier insists it is none of their business; and the festival's opening night is coming, with Draycott a leading force and a band of musicians on the programme.

The trap, when it springs, is elegant. The musicians produce guns hidden in their instruments and take Draycott prisoner at gunpoint, "arresting" him for crimes against humanity as his daughter Anna — who found her mother's diary and made the international call that brought Rosenbaum — watches. Greta, her mother, was Jewish; she left a full confession; and Anna, having warned her father once, chooses justice over family. Bergerac, realising the tickets to the festival were from her, races to stop the plane, but Rosenbaum and his men take Muller off the island by boat. Anna takes full responsibility for the kidnapping.

The episode refuses to moralise. Bergerac has broken his own rules; Crozier has been right about the letter of the law; and a man who stood beside Himmler has been taken, by citizens, to face a justice the island would not provide. The final image is Bergerac calling Susan to invite her to the festival — a small human gesture against the weight of history. A grave, careful hour, and one of the most serious things the sixth series did.