If you click on the screenshot below, you’ll go to a newly-revised 58-minute Frontline documentary called “Memory of the Camps,” a film produced by the British and American military film services, and partly directed by Alfred Hitchcock. Narrated by Trevor Howard, it’s a graphic depiction of what the Allied armies found when they liberated several concentration camps. WARNING: The scenes are graphic and can be very disturbing.
The film, intended to enlighten the German public about what their government had been up to, was never shown (read about the film’s history here). The reels languished in the Imperial War Museum in London for years, but were reassembled and shown on Frontline (PBS) in 1985. The previously missing sixth reel, on Auschwitz (beginning 54:30), has been restored in this fairly new version.
I hadn’t seen the whole thing until yesterday (I watched it at lunchtime: not a good idea), but I think everyone who hasn’t seen it should. Howard’s narration is low-key and undramatic, yet the scenes are horrifying. Some day I’ll put up the pictures I took at Auschwitz when I visited Krakow a few years ago. It’s a must-see site for those visiting Poland.
Anyway, click below if you have an hour and won’t be driven away by seeing some of the horrors of the camps.
Two years ago the New Yorker wrote about the film in a piece by Richard Brody called “Hitchcock and the Holocaust.” I’ll give just one excerpt:
The images of emaciated corpses dragged through the dust, carried on the back, swung and tossed into pits atop other contorted and emaciated corpses, have been pressed into memory by shock and horror—not necessarily these specific images, but possibly others of the many, many hours of documentary images filmed when, after the war, the Allies liberated the camps. What’s preserved in the editing of the film is the astonishment of Allied soldiers upon discovering the camps. Their discovery was also the world’s discovery, and the film conveys the sense of a world out of joint, a total catastrophe that defies comprehension and seems like a sort of ubiquitous madness, even as its careful industrial organization becomes all the clearer.
Yet it may be the very familiarity of such images—no one of which has particular ascension over another—that shifts the emphasis, in “Memory of the Camps,” to two sequences. One presents the response of British medical authorities to the louse infestation that was responsible for the spread of typhus: burning the empty barracks. The flames that consume the wooden structures and rage in the night have a metaphorical power—suggesting both the incineration of millions of corpses, and a sort of divine vengeance against the perpetrators—that raises the images outside the realm of journalism and into a terrifying realm of art. The other, showing the mass graves covered over with earth and marked by placards, evokes, in the barrenness and vastness of the graves, the totality of the Nazi crimes that, somehow, seem to surpass their particular enumeration. In this sequence, “Memory of the Camps” comes closest to fulfilling its title—it becomes a film about memory, akin to Alain Resnais’s “Night and Fog,” in which the images of the victims in the camps already belong to the archive, and the facts of the Holocaust need to be rescued from oblivion.
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I will not be able to watch … although I should. But to suggest that the Allies didn’t know … they had lots and lots of hints that something horrific was going on … but allowed political considerations to persuade them to turn a blind eye. They share the guilt with all of those Germans who also knew SOMETHING BAD was happening, but chose NOT to know, chose NOT to see.
Truly one of the worst episodes in human history.
I’m going to guess that most of the rank and file soldiers knew little to nothing. My husband’s father belonged to one of the US troops which came to the camps. He never, ever talked about it.
“Something horrific” can also be a pretty broad category.
There were 10,000 “Lageren” just in Germany. Everyone knew people were being held immorally and also exterminated.
The really bad excesses of the Holocaust were during the war. I’m not sure; but I’d guess the most effective thing to do was beat Germany at that point.
Leaving aside completely that Hitler was pretty clear what he wanted to do long before he came to power. People in the late 30s seemed to be paralyzed by denial and distaste for the consequences of acknowledging what Hitler was really up to. A long hangover from WWI.
IBM serviced machines in camps. Capitalism, I suppose, allows one to justify or ignore horror.
“What’s preserved in the editing of the film is the astonishment of Allied soldiers upon discovering the camps. Their discovery was also the world’s discovery”
If the Allied soldiers were surprised by what they saw, it was only because the censorship of the holocaust was so effective in the West. As Prof. Michael Fleming reveals, the Allies received 45 reports from the Polish Underground alarming the West about the mass murder of Jews. Please watch this short video:
I tried to watch, but found it very difficult. Will give it another try later.
The treatment of the Jews after the war ended is a story that has not been well told. General Patton was put in charge of the “Displaced Persons” program. He was highly anti-semitic and not only treated the people in the camps poorly, but even put some of the Nazis in positions of authority in the camps. Here is a link to an article about this. http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/sunday-review/surviving-the-nazis-only-to-be-jailed-by-america.html?_r=0.
Here’s some extremely powerful testimony from one of the first Americans (he was 19) into Buchenwald. Hard reading at times:
http://remember.org/liberators.html
That’s pretty gut-wrenching, especially when the soldiers just allows the prisoners to hang one of the Germans.
I recommend everyone read:
Hitler’s Willing Executioners Goldhagen
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich Shirer
If nothing else, read the Chapter in Rise and Fall: “Inside the New Order”. Absolutely chilling.
I know how much you dislike it when people tell you what you should write about, but I’ve been waiting to read about your experience of your visit to Auschwitz since you first wrote that you were going there, maybe two or three years ago.
I’d really appreciate reading of your experience there, and seeing the pictures you took, so I really hope that you’ll write about it. (It’s not a small thing, writing about it, I know. I have a friend who went who can’t speak about the experience at all.)
The memory from “the camps” that I’ll take to my grave is of the beating table at Dachau. A wonderfully simply design for controlling someone while you torture them. That’s a pretty shudder-inducing thought.
The builders, plumbers and chemical engineers who built the several iterations of prototype gas chambers could not have not known what they were designing. But for simplicity in calculated cruelty, that table makes my ring grip straws.
Dehumanization. I’ve read the Milgram experiment and I understand it, but I don’t think I’ll ever “get it.” I believe the SS foot soldiers knew exactly what they were doing, yet none of them defected or, better yet, went out en-mass refusing to carry out their orders. I also understand that during war a certain amount of dehumanizing the enemy is necessary for a nation state’s military to complete their objectives (the Roman military spent extra time to teach stabbing vice just slashing). But, you watch that video and you have to ask, how do you get to the point where you think it is right to do those things to non-combatants (or even captured combatants)?
I believe we humans have a mental weakness that under certain conditions will allow events like the holocaust to occur. I also think that the only way to prevent them from happening is to educate ourselves on the history of humanity’s inhumanity to humanity.
I have not watched this movie yet, but will. I have read the books of Primo Levi and Elie Weisel. I recommend that anyone that hasn’t read them, do so. There are numerous other firsthand accounts by camp inmates who survived the Holocaust.
I have seen photographs taken by a journalist traveling with Eisenhower who arrived at one of the camps before Eisenhower did. There are pictures of dead Jews lying along the fence. There are pictures of boxcars with open doors
in which are still Jewish prisoners to weak to disembark. One man was sitting in the doorway in one picture, but dead in one taken shortly after.
I think that those people who claim the holocaust didn’t really happen, should be forced to watch this movie even though they
might still disbelieve. At least, it might give them nightmares!
In re the U.S. knowing about the camps and not doing anything about it until the end: I don’t think students of WWII history have been informed sufficiently well about how difficult it was for U.S. leadership to get authorization and funding to enter the war. The people didn’t want our participation in a war in Europe. We dragged our feet. When it was known about the camps, we couldn’t bomb them without killing most, or all, of the prisoners. We were reluctant to bomb railroads for similar reasons.
I did not watch. I knew two women who were interred and my wife’s uncle was a German POW in Stalag 17B for three years (not the same, but he wrote a memoir).
It is important that this be remembered. Thanks for posting it.
I watched.
Within the last hour’s time, I watched.
“but they were mostly … … silent.”
I know about such … … silence.
In wars UNrecognized.
Blue
I watched.
A cantor came to speak to my class when I was in middle school. He was an Auschwitz survivor. Survived hanging (rope broke), gas chamber line (pulled out by guard to carry a body to a grave), severe starvation… His wife survived, too. Watching the video, remembering his stories, I still can’t begin to fathom it.
We owe it to the victims of these German camps to watch the documentary, but let’s not fool ourselves that we’re exhibiting any kind of courage in doing so. What really required courage was the feat of Witold Pilecki – the man who volunteered to go to Auschwitz!
Should be shown in every School and College as compulsory viewing , to show the younger Generation that this is where Fascism leads.
I can give you the names of the two British army chaplains reading prayers at Belsen: one was Leslie Hardman, an orthodox Rabbi who died in 2008; the other was the Catholic priest, Father Michael Morrison who died in 1973. There is one, if this is even possible, more horrific sequence from Belsen that is not in the film, and that is of a British soldier, possibly the one that we see, using a bulldozer to push the bodies into the mass grave.
I have been watching it because I thought I should, but can only manage brief segments. And I’m not sure I am going to go on. It is almost wholly unbearable.
But the same sort of thing goes on – as Joel Oppenheimer’s films about the Indonesian massacres show, and as sections of The Salt of the Earth, an extraordinary documentary by Wim Wenders about the work of the great documentary photographer Sebastiao Salgado, also shows: there is an unbearable – that is the best word – in the film about Congolese refugees and how they all ‘disappear’, dead of starvation or murdered.
With the number of Holocaust survivors dwindling ever more rapidly year by year, it becomes an object of even greater importance to preserve and disseminate the historic facts on this massive crime against humanity. Human beings seem to have really good “forgetters” due to the very nature of our thinking: information about phenomena and events in our lives that does not seem to directly produce a “negative” effect upon US is far more easily “minimized”, disregarded, and, ultimately, forgotten, unless periodic “booster-shots” of the truth are applied.
It is also of vital importance to keep up with this in order to counteract those who, because of racial or ethnic hatreds and/or extreme nationalism, insist that it never happened; that the deaths were due to starvation from wartime shortages (which, in effect, is blaming the allies for it) and epidemics; that there never was a formal policy of extermination, etc., etc- these people have all the tenacity and stubbornness of creationists and new “incarnations” of them will never cease trying to re-write history to suit their own version.
Almost to the very end of the war, the Nazis were utilizing a significant percentage of their rolling-stock (vitally needed for the war effort) to transport Jews to the camps, in a desperate effort to “finish the job” of eliminating them all.
That is why, pace such as Alex Rosenberg, the discipline of history is important.