During the April of 1945, in Germany, the World War II was drawing to a close, with the Allied Forces moving towards Berlin. Among their ranks were also soldiers that were newly trained as combat cameramen with the sole duty to document the gruesome scenes behind the recently liberated Nazi concentration camps on behalf of the British Government. The 1945 documentary was named “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” and it was produced by Sidney Bernstein with the participation of Alfred Hitchcock. For nearly seven decades, the film was shelved in the British archives, abandoned without a public screening for either political reasons or shifted Government priorities, to be ultimately completed by a team of historians and film scholars of the British Imperial War Museum, who meticulously restored the original footage. Intertwined with interviews of both survivors and liberators, as well as short newsreel films and raw footage from the original film, the 2014 documentary chronicles the atrocities that occurred in the concentration and labour camps of Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz, Majdanek, Dachau and Buchenwald, including footage from Soviet cameramen. Without shying away, the camera pans on the German SS officers, lingering on the bony, emaciated faces of the piled up like dolls bodies of men that were thrown into pits during the mass grave digging operations. However, even though the film documents a world of nightmare, exposing the undeniable, harsh truth of what has been going on within these camps, it also focuses on the healing process of the completely dehumanised survivors, in an attempt to serve as a testimony of the Nazi crimes but above all, as an important lesson for all mankind.
Andre Singer
Helena Bonham Carter, Jasper Britton, Leonard Berney, George Leonard
07 Jun 2014 (UK)
7 wins & 13 nominations.tt3455822 , World War Ii