Inside Alfred Hitchcock’s Lost Holocaust Documentary

In 1945, Britain’s army film unit commissioned a sprawling doc on the liberation of Nazi concentration camps, supervised by Hitchcock. A new film explores the forgotten masterpiece.

Back in 1945, Sidney Bernstein, the chief of the Psychological Warfare Film Section of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, was commissioned to create the definitive documentary chronicling the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. Bernstein’s aim was, in his words, to “prove one day that this had actually happened” and have it serve as “a lesson to all mankind as well as to the Germans.”

“It is, perhaps, the greatest documentary never made.”

Perhaps?

Why use weasel words?

That kidding aside, this does sound amazing and important.

There are a number of good documentaries that have been made that use Nazi footage and other footage. The Nazi’s documented their atrocities quite well.

These sort of historical documentaries are important.

I really dislike tepid melodramas like Schindler’s List exploiting such horrors.

I showed this film to my 8th grade students for many years. I told them I was going to take them to Hell. It is very graphic, and nearly all of students were shaken by the experience—yet I never had a complaint by either parents or administrators. I showed it to them because I knew they would live most of their lives after the survivors had died and the deniers would have no one with first-hand knowledge to refute them.

The first camp featured is Bergen-Belsen. Anne Frank is believed to died about a month before liberation. Since they were reading a play based on her diary in English class, I was able to give them an idea of her last views of this world.

It is unfinished, with fairly long gaps in the narration. Worth seeing.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/481126.htm — Were it only a measure of impartiality on the part of the British who, unable to stop the hundreds of ships sailing to Palestine, to try to keep back these 12,000 who were luckless enough to be hunted down by the British Navy; were it only a measure of impartiality, then the British were obliged to let the detainees be guests of the crown in this crown colony, and they should have let them go free to Europe, whence they came. But the intention is to avenge on these twelve thousand for the British failure in Palestine.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/480714.htm — Count Bernadotte expected the Israelis to surrender all this from the rights allotted to them by the partition plan of the United Nations. The Arabs (and the British, who are favored by all these concessions) are expected to trade Western Galilee, occupied by Israeli troops, for the larger Negeb. They were not asked to make any concessions from the rights allotted to them by the partition plan.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/480712.htm — The British gave up their mandate in dishonor. For three decades and especially during the past ten years, they have done everything that could be of hindrance to the Jewish national home. Before leaving the country, they made a deliberate plan to fight the Jews of Palestine, not with British soldiers, but with Arab soldiers, and not with British money, but with American money. They calculate that the Israelis would beat the Army of Liberation of the ex-Mufti. The British fear and mistrust the ex-Mufti and, in this manner, played against him, while on the surface they support his Arab Higher Committee. Then they let loose on Israel the Legion of John B. Glubb Pasha, and did it with outright deceit in Parliament.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/480223.htm — After a long struggle and supreme sacrifices, the “murderous violators” became victors. They entered Germany while the ex-Mufti was still there with the bags of gold he had received from Hitler. He escaped to Switzerland, was expelled from there back to Germany, was captured by the French army and placed under house arrest; then he escaped from France to Cairo on a false passport, and became the head of the Arab Higher Committee.

http://www.varchive.org/obs/490102.htm — The Israelis could easily capture the rest of Palestine in a matter of a few weeks. When the Arabs realized this, they sought protection of that same political body whose authority they flouted one year ago by defying the will of the Unites Nations and rejecting partition.

...Hitchcock served as a “director’s advisor,” supervising the way the footage was edited. He demanded that the documentary emphasized long shoots and frequent pans, so that people wouldn’t question its authenticity. He was also blown away by the stark contrast between the quotidian (the lives of Germans living near the camps) and the ghastly (the nightmare within), and requested that the film use maps to highlight their proximity, driving home the message that these German citizens knew exactly what was going on.

Not only did 'these German citizens' know - they had friends and relatives in other citites... they ALL knew. Freaky little monsters...

At least one of the US generals forced the local gentry to tour the nearby camp after liberation. The magnitude of the crimes was laid out in front of them, and resulted in suicides here and there. In the book “Interrogations”, one of the SS flunkies who operated the gas chamber in one of the camps said, to his interrogator (who was a turned German) how bad the operator booth smelled, but how after a while, one could eat a sandwich in there.

A Jewish child in Poland who was taken by his parents to stay with a Gentile family, friends of theirs, was at a grocery with his “adopted” family, and listened to the grocer laugh about how the child’s entire village, including his parents, had been rounded up and hauled away. He never saw anyone from his childhood again, including any member of his family, and it took him some years before he had any trust or love for anyone.

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