An essential Holocaust film

By Caroline Moorehead

In the closing weeks of the second world war, work began on an uncompromising and essential documentary about the Holocaust, which is being remembered today on Holocaust Memorial Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” was conceived by Sidney Bernstein, who later founded Granada television. It includes footage filmed by Bernstein himself at Bergen-Belsen and by the Soviets and Americans at Auschwitz, Majdanek and Dachau. Later this year the film, recently restored by the Imperial War Museum, will be released in Britain by the British Film Institute. The rough cut was completed in 1945, and this will be its first general release.

The story of the making and shelving of Bernstein’s film is told in “Night Will Fall”, broadcast on Channel 4 last weekend and now available to watch online. In the third week of April 1945 Bernstein, then working for the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force, arrived at Belsen, which had just been liberated. The bodies of some 13,000 men and women lay around the camp, in barracks, on the ground, in piles; a further 60,000 were dying of starvation and disease, and not all could be saved by the medical teams. The dead and dying were skeletons, barely human, shapes of bone and skull. Bernstein ordered his team of cameramen to film everything: the corpses, those barely alive, the SS guards who were made to carry the bodies to pits for mass burial, as well as the survivors receiving warm clothes and being given baths. He demanded that the mayors and dignitaries of the surrounding villages be brought in to witness what they had chosen not to see, and he filmed them too, staring in horror at the pits full of naked and half-naked corpses. He asked his cameramen to take wide-angle and tracking shots to make the geography clear, so that later it would not be possible for anyone to say that the film had been staged.