Liberation Newsreels Were Faked

The newsreels exist. They were filmed by Allied military camera units in the days and weeks after the liberation of each major camp, between January and May 1945. The footage and the contemporaneous shot reports of the camera operators survive in their entirety; they are held at the National Archives in Washington, the Imperial War Museum in London, and the Bundesarchiv in Koblenz. The film stocks have been examined by film conservators, the original camera reports by historians, and the editorial decisions made for newsreel release by media historians. The denial of the footage cannot be reconciled with the documentary record of who filmed what, when, where and under whose orders.

Who filmed the camps

The principal Western Allied film coverage was the work of three units. The British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945 with the units of the 11th Armoured Division. The unit’s senior cameraman, Sergeant Mike Lewis, and the British Movietone News crew embedded with him, filmed the camp continuously from 15 to 24 April. The footage forms the basis of the documentary Memory of the Camps, supervised editorially by Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock for the Ministry of Information, completed (in part) in 1945, and held at the Imperial War Museum in its Department of Film. The American 12th Army Group’s Signal Corps Photographic Unit filmed at Buchenwald (entered 11 April), Dachau (entered 29 April), Mauthausen (entered 5 May) and several smaller camps. The Soviet Central Documentary Film Studios filmed at Majdanek (entered July 1944, with Roman Karmen as principal cameraman), at Auschwitz (entered January 1945, footage by Aleksander Vorontsov and others), and at the camps liberated by the Red Army across the rest of 1945.

The camera operators in each case wrote contemporary shot reports describing the date, location, what was filmed, and the conditions under which it was filmed. The reports are matter-of-fact military documentation produced for the unit war diaries and not for any propaganda purpose. They survive in the archives. The footage matches the reports.

What the footage shows

The footage shows what was on the ground at the camps when the Allied units arrived. At Bergen-Belsen this included approximately 13,000 unburied corpses (the SS administrative breakdown had collapsed in the final weeks; bodies had accumulated in the open between barracks), approximately 60,000 living prisoners in conditions of extreme malnutrition and untreated disease (typhus, dysentery, typhoid, tuberculosis), the partly destroyed infrastructure, and the SS personnel who had not fled (most had escaped, but some were captured and filmed being made to bury the dead). At Dachau the footage shows the partly emptied camp (with the SS having marched many prisoners out on death marches in the preceding days), the bodies in the train of Buchenwald evacuees that had arrived at Dachau after most of its passengers had died en route, and the surviving prisoners. At Auschwitz, the Soviet film shows the largely emptied camp (most prisoners had been marched out on the evacuation of January 1945), the surviving sick and elderly who had been left behind, the warehouses of stored property (the Kanada warehouses), the surviving structures, and the demolished crematoria.

The footage was not staged. The camera operators arrived on the ground at the moment of liberation; the conditions they filmed were the conditions they found. They had no time to prepare; the camps had not been arranged for their visit; the dead had not been gathered for the cameras. Some footage at some camps was filmed in subsequent days as the British and American forces forced local German civilians to bury the dead (notably at Bergen-Belsen and at the smaller camp at Ohrdruf, which was Eisenhower’s personal initiative), and these scenes were of course not spontaneous; they were of an organised burial operation, filmed because the Allied command had decided that the German civilians and the world should see what had been done. The fact of the organisation does not make the dead any less dead.

The Bergen-Belsen footage and the typhus argument

The denier claim that the bodies in the footage are typhus victims rather than killed prisoners is a half-truth applied dishonestly. At Bergen-Belsen, where most of the famous footage was filmed, many of the visible dead had indeed died of typhus, dysentery, typhoid and starvation in the final weeks before liberation, when the camp had been overwhelmed by the arrival of evacuation transports from camps further east and the SS administration had effectively collapsed. The British liberators did not pretend otherwise; the contemporaneous medical reports by Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, the senior medical officer of the 21st Army Group, identified the principal causes of death and the immediate medical needs. The reports are in the Imperial War Museum and have been published in scholarly editions.

The denier sleight of hand is to use this as evidence that there was no killing operation. Typhus deaths at Bergen-Belsen in March and April 1945 do not refute the killings at Auschwitz, Treblinka, Sobibór, Bełżec, the Einsatzgruppen sites and the Operation Reinhard camps in 1942 and 1943. They are different operations at different places. The Bergen-Belsen footage is honest evidence of what Bergen-Belsen had become in its final weeks; the killings elsewhere are documented by different evidence at different sites. The newsreel narration sometimes oversimplified by not making the distinctions clear; the underlying footage is what it is.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim that the newsreels were faked is harmful because it asks the listener to dismiss as fabrication the contemporaneous moving-image record produced by Allied military camera units and held in three national archives. The cameramen exist as named individuals with continuous military service records. The film stocks survive with their original frame numbers. The contemporary shot reports survive. The editorial files of the newsreel companies and government information ministries survive. The medical reports of the senior officers who arrived at the camps survive. The denial requires the listener to accept that all of this material has been collectively forged across multiple armies, multiple countries, multiple archives, multiple decades, by people who in many cases never met. This is not an evidential argument; it is the rejection of evidence as a category.

Who filmed the footage? Where are the original film stocks held? What do the cameramen’s contemporary shot reports say?

See also

• The Newsreels
• The Kanada Warehouses at Auschwitz
• The Death Marches

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Sources

• Imperial War Museum, Department of Film, British Army Film and Photographic Unit collection on Bergen-Belsen, with the original camera reports by Sergeant Mike Lewis and others, April 1945
• Sidney Bernstein and Alfred Hitchcock (supervisors), German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (also known as Memory of the Camps), Ministry of Information, 1945, completed and released in restored form by the Imperial War Museum in 2014
• US National Archives, Record Group 111 (Signal Corps Photographs), with the Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and Ohrdruf footage and the original shot reports
• Roman Karmen and others, Soviet Central Documentary Film Studios, footage of Majdanek (1944), Auschwitz (1945) and other Eastern liberations, in the Russian State Documentary Film and Photo Archive, Krasnogorsk
• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, contemporaneous medical reports on Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and the Wellcome Library
• Toby Haggith, “The Filming of the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Its Impact on the Understanding of the Holocaust”, in Holocaust Studies, 12:1 to 2, 2006
• Robert H. Abzug, Inside the Vicious Heart: Americans and the Liberation of Nazi Concentration Camps, Oxford University Press, 1985
• Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany 1945 to 1950, Wayne State University Press, 2002
• Jeremy Hicks, First Films of the Holocaust: Soviet Cinema and the Genocide of the Jews 1938 to 1946, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012
• Imperial War Museum, “Memory of the Camps: The Film That Was Lost”, https://www.iwm.org.uk
• USHMM, “Liberation of Nazi Camps”, with film clips and provenance information, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org