The Allied governments produced documentary newsreels of the camps and arranged for them to be shown to mass civilian audiences in Germany, in the Allied countries and around the world. The newsreels were among the most consequential documentary films of the twentieth century. They established the visual record of the Holocaust for the public memory and they were used as evidence at the Nuremberg trials.
The British and American films
The British Army Film and Photographic Unit had filmed the liberation of Belsen in detail in April 1945. The footage was edited under the supervision of Sidney Bernstein and a young Alfred Hitchcock, who acted as treatment adviser, into a documentary intended for German audiences. The film was largely complete by autumn 1945 but was never released, partly because Allied policy by that point was shifting towards reconstruction rather than confrontation. The film lay in the Imperial War Museum archive for forty years before being completed and broadcast as Memory of the Camps in 1985.
The American documentary Death Mills (in German, Die Todesmuhlen) was made by the Office of War Information and was shown in the US zone of occupied Germany from January 1946. It ran twenty-two minutes and was screened in cinemas across the American zone. In some areas, the film was made compulsory: civilians could not collect their ration books without producing a stamped ticket showing they had attended a screening.
The Soviet films
The Soviet Central Newsreel Studio produced documentaries on Majdanek, on Auschwitz and on the camps in eastern Germany. The Auschwitz film, Chronicle of the Liberation of Auschwitz, was filmed by Soviet camera teams who entered the camp with the 60th Army on 27 January 1945. The footage of the surviving prisoners and of the children showing the numbers tattooed on their arms became some of the most-reproduced images of the Holocaust.
The Nuremberg use
The American prosecution at Nuremberg used the documentary footage as evidence on the second day of the trial, 29 November 1945. A film called Nazi Concentration Camps, compiled from the British, American and Soviet liberation footage, was screened in the courtroom. Several of the defendants were visibly shaken. Hans Frank wept. Hermann Göring later complained that the screening had ruined the otherwise good day he had been having.
The continuing visibility of the films
The newsreels and the documentary films of the liberations have been re-edited, re-broadcast and re-used in countless subsequent documentaries about the Holocaust. The Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald footage in particular has become so widely known that it functions as the visual shorthand for the camps in popular consciousness. Most of the footage is now in the public domain and is held in the Imperial War Museum, the National Archives in Washington and the Russian state film archive.
See also
Sources
- Saul Friedländer, Nazi Germany and the Jews, 2 vols, HarperCollins, 1997 and 2007
- Christopher Browning, The Origins of the Final Solution, University of Nebraska Press and Yad Vashem, 2004
- Peter Longerich, Holocaust: The Nazi Persecution and Murder of the Jews, Oxford University Press, 2010
- Ian Kershaw, Hitler 1936 to 1945: Nemesis, Allen Lane, 2000
- Trial transcripts and judgment, Trials of War Criminals before the Nuernberg Military Tribunals under Control Council Law No. 10, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949 onwards