Did Abel learn anything?

<spoilers>

Some reviewers claim that he never learned a thing, but it seems to me that gradually he did. It took quite awhile, but by the end of the film he had rethought what he had done enough to urge the boys in the castle to flee from it to save their lives. Failing that, he fled himself, saving what he could: one small child carried on his shoulders (a Jewish child. Recall their maxim: to save one life is to save the world). He proved himself to be ultimately a better man than all those (and there were many) who saw and discovered the same things but neither learned or changed.

Steps and signs along the way:

Hearing that people in the countryside called him an ogre;

Witnessing the conflict between the race-crazed ideologue Blaettchen and the more pragmatic Raufeisen;

Lothar's fatal accident and death, with Abel kneeling at the bedside helpless while the boy feebly cried "Mommy, Mommy;"

Kaltenborn's expression of disillusionment and his warnings of doom;

Abel surveying the dormitory one night, worrying about what would happen to all the boys he had brought there;

Blaettchen's cowardly departure, hoarding precious loaves of bread, with the lame excuse, "I must report on my results;"

Frau Netta's horrified description of the "death camps" that no one was to know about;

Abel's taking Ephraim into the castle, perfectly consistently with his indiscriminate sense of caring yet secretly, because he realized that this would be forbidden; and the violence of the reaction when discovered;

Abel's being attacked, and his glasses smashed, by the boys he was hoping to save, because of the fanatical brainwashing they had undergone; his efforts nevertheless to raise a white flag of truce, in hopes that the lives of the boys would be spared, even though it meant the end of the mythical brotherhood that he and they had cherished.

The director gives us an Abel's-eye view of the castle and its little society. At first it is a paradise, but the cracks in this fantasy begin to appear and become more and more obvious.