Night Will Fall (2014) - full transcript

With World War II
in Europe drawing to a close,

the three allied armies,
British, Soviet and American,

began their move towards Berlin.

Among their ranks were soldiers
newly trained as cameramen.

In April 1945,
an advancing British unit

halted by the river Aare,
Northern Germany.

As events unfolded, they were recorded
by the army camera crews.

I think it was
about the 12th of April.

Apparently, two German officers
approached our front line

with a white flag asking
to speak to our General,

and they were ushered through,
blindfolded actually,



and taken to our corps headquarters
where I happened to be.

And they had a message
from their General.

The message was
that we were approaching,

or probably going to approach

a large civilian prison camp

where typhus had broken out

and their General wanted
to send a message

to say that he didn't think
it was a good idea

if we fought through that camp

because those inmates
with typhus would get loose

and would get amongst
the civilian population

and the German army
and the British army.

They pulled us out, up a track,

and we had to hoist
a white flag of truce.



This is... Out of nowhere
this has happened.

We were sent under
the flag of truce,

miles behind enemy lines.

The Germans,
in fairness to them,

on the road,
they all got off the road

and they were all armed on the sides
of the roads as we were driving through.

The more I think about it now,

I'm amazed
that none of us opened fire.

But in fairness to the Germans,

not one of them fired
and not one of us fired either.

The British
camera crews continued to film.

Their footage was to become part of
an extraordinary documentary

produced for the Allies
by Sidney Bernstein

with a team that included
the director Alfred Hitchcock.

This film, called German
Concentration Camps Factual Survey,

has been described as a forgotten
masterpiece of British documentary cinema.

Yet it was abandoned,
unfinished,

until now, 70 years later.

In the spring of 1945,

the Allies advancing
into the heart of Germany

came to Bergen-Belsen.

Neat and tidy orchards,

well-stocked farms
lined the wayside.

And the British soldier did not fail
to admire the place and its inhabitants.

At least, until he began
to feel a smell.

Then dawn came up.

And then we could see where
the stench was coming from.

I think one of
the first things we did

was to line up all
the SS men and women

and took them, made them
prisoners of war basically.

The SS were still there.

Josef Kramer was still there,

the camp Commandant.

I looked at the tower
and the tower was empty.

And there was always
a German there with a shotgun

or with whatever he had.

And I started screaming,

"The Germans are gone,
I don't see any Germans!"

And some girls ran with me

and we made it to the gate,

and I am behind
a barbed wire fence

to witness
the first British troop

entering the camp.

We had
a loudspeaker van with us.

We went into the camp
to see what we could see,

and of course
what we could see was

a complete, utter shock,

and I'll never forget it.

Through a loudspeaker,
in different languages, they said,

"Be calm, be calm, be calm.
Stay where you are.

"Be calm. Help is on the way.

"We are the British soldiers.
Help is on the way."

And people went just crazy.

It was an unbelievable moment.

Suddenly you hear
English spoken.

"We should remain calm, don't leave
the camp, help is on the way,"

you know, that sort of thing.

Yeah, it's very difficult to describe.
It was, you know...

You've spent years
preparing yourself to die

and suddenly you're still here,
you know.

I was 19 when
the Liberation came

and, I mean, it was very difficult
to actually take on board.

We thought we
were dreaming, really,

and every British soldier
looked like a God to us.

Yeah. Well, it was, uh...

It was not what we expected,
to still be alive, but there we were.

We didn't know what
we were going to go into.

We were sent...

Um, and then we drove...

Excuse me.

Sorry about this.

Too painful.

Dead prisoners
hurled out and stacked in twisted heaps.

Dead women like marble statues
in the mire.

This was what these inmates
had to live among,

and die among.

The dead which lay there
were not numbered in hundreds,

but in thousands.

Not one or two thousands,

but 30,000.

We drove in and saw a sight

that shook us as nothing

even the sights of war had
ever, ever, ever shown us before.

It was pain to look at it,

pain that this could
happen to people.

There was hundreds
and hundreds of dead bodies

sort of piled up.

There were... There was a
stench of death everywhere.

There were pits,
containing bodies of people

as large as lawn tennis courts,

containing babies, girls, youths,
men, women, old, young,

and how deep, we didn't know.

These half-dead
people walking about,

glazed eyes and...

Absolutely...

Dead.

There was hopelessness.

The stare,

the appalling smell,

the whole atmosphere
of depression.

Like the end had come.

The bodies...
You lost contact with reality.

They were dummies,
they were dolls, they were...

I don't know whether
we ourselves

withdrew into another

space, time, existence,

but you could never associate
what you were seeing

with your own life,
if you know what I mean.

This was something completely separate.
It was another world.

I don't think...
If you had become too involved,

I think you would probably
have gone mad.

We were there for about two weeks,
filming all these sights,

which no film which
I have seen since

really conveys the feeling
of despair and horror

that can be done to people

who are Europeans
of another faith,

for no other reason.

And I thought as time went by
it might leave me.

I wanted to forget.

But it never does leave you.

I find it hard to describe adequately

the horrible things
that I've seen and heard.

But here, unadorned,
are the facts.

I passed through the barrier and
found myself in the world of a nightmare.

Dead bodies,
some of them in decay,

lay strewn about the road
and along the rutted tracks.

On each side of the road
were brown wooden huts.

There were faces at the windows.

The bony emaciated faces

of starving women,
too weak to come outside,

propping themselves
against the glass

to see the daylight
before they die.

And they were dying,
every hour and every minute.

It was so horrific
that the BBC initially

waited before they broadcast it,

because they had doubts

whether my father had actually

accurately described
what he'd seen.

And they checked
and then put it out.

It's the moment when he describes,

"People no longer behave
like human beings"

that you realize
what he's actually saying,

what the implied message
of this is.

This isn't just Germany.

This isn't just the people
in those camps.

This could be any of you,
anywhere,

if civilization breaks down
in this way.

The day after
the report, Churchill declared,

"No words can express
the horror which is felt

"by His Majesty's government
and their principal allies

"at the proofs
of these frightful crimes

"now daily coming into view."

The success of cinema
in the 1930s

had underlined the power
of the moving image.

Keen to exploit
its potential role in war,

Britain and America set up
a joint film department.

Its brief was to produce
short propaganda films,

initially to support
the war effort,

and later to assist the task

of dealing with a defeated Germany
once the war was won.

In Britain, this unit was headed
by leading film producer

Sidney Bernstein.

The day following
Churchill's statement,

Bernstein set out
for Bergen-Belsen.

By the time he arrived,
the army film cameramen

had been at work for a week.

The film shot at Bergen-Belsen
by the British cameramen

reveal every level of humanity,

to a much greater extent
than any other

of the film evidence.

It feels as if the whole

human story is there.

They used the
camera in a very specific way.

There was a...

It began to be directed to collect
evidence, to gather evidence.

So one of the difficulties
about filming an atrocity,

is that, in order
to reveal that a person

has been murdered or brutalized,

what you have to do is
you have to reveal that

by getting close to the person,

because you have to show
the wounds,

have to give some indication
of how they've been killed.

Now, that went against
the tradition previously

of combat cameramen,

where they'd shied away
from representing

or recording scenes of people
who'd been killed or brutalized.

For Bernstein,

the visit to Bergen-Belsen
was galvanizing.

On his return to London

he began planning
a full-length documentary.

Its purpose was clear from guidelines
he issued to the allied cameramen.

My instructions were to film

everything which would
prove one day

that this had actually happened.

It'd be a lesson
to all mankind, as well.

As to the Germans,

the whole film that we
were putting together

was designed to show
to the German people.

Because most of them
on their way down,

and on the troops' way down,

had denied they knew anything
about the camps.

This would be the evidence
which we could show them.

First of all, I...

I wanted them to record that all
the local bigwigs and people,

the municipal Burgomaster
and the like,

who lived within
a reasonable range,

saw what was being done,

in burying these tragic figures.

Some of the Germans
we brought in to be filmed

when the bodies were
being buried in the pit,

just couldn't look anymore.

I wanted to prove that they had
seen it, so there was evidence,

because I guessed rightly that most
people would deny that it happened.

Bernstein also
used footage of German SS officers

helping with the worst
of the tasks in the camp.

There was an urgent need
to get rid of as many bodies as possible

as quickly as possible,
so all the SS were set to work.

Five hundred Hungarian troops
captured with the SS

were started on
a grave-digging operation.

The SS themselves were made
to do the unpleasant job

they had forced
the inmates to do.

This, after all, was nothing
to these men.

They, the Master Race,
had been taught to be hard.

They could kill in cold blood,

and it seemed, to the British soldier,
fit and proper

that the killers should bury
the nameless, hopeless creatures

they had starved to death.

The army
film units had no sound equipment.

It wasn't until
news teams arrived

that Bernstein was able to
access some sound recordings.

Today is the 24th
of April, 1945.

My name is Gunner Illingworth,
and I live in Cheshire.

I'm at present in Belsen camp doing
guard duty over the SS men.

The things in this camp
are beyond describing.

When you actually see them for yourselves,
you know what you're fighting for here.

Pictures in the paper
cannot describe it at all.

The things they
have committed, well,

nobody'd think they
were human at all.

We actually know now what
has been going on in these camps.

And I know personally
what I'm fighting for.

Once Bernstein's documentary proposal

had been approved by both British
and American governments,

he hired perhaps the best-known
film editor in London,

Stewart McAllister.

Together, they began to assemble
the army film footage

now arriving in the edit rooms.

The deadline for completion
of the film was set at just three months.

The news from Bergen-Belsen

was not entirely a surprise
to the British government.

Soviet intelligence had reported
uncovering concentration camps

in Poland
as early as July, 1944.

But as the Soviets had a record
of falsifying atrocity reports,

the Allies ignored
their information.

Now, in the light
of Bergen-Belsen,

the British reconsidered,

and Bernstein broadened
the scope of his film

to include footage
from the Soviet camps.

The Soviets
discovered few living inmates at Majdanek.

In the face
of the advancing troops,

the Germans had begun emptying
their camps in Poland,

sending prisoners westwards to camps
including Bergen-Belsen.

The evidence filmed in Poland
became part of Bernstein's documentary.

Prisoners paid
their own fares to Majdanek.

They thought they were going
to new homes,

and so they brought their most
precious portable possessions.

They say dead men's boots
bring bad luck.

What of dead children's toys?

Their mothers
carried scissors perhaps.

The scissors are here.
The mothers, no.

But here in this room
is part of them.

Nothing material could
be wasted.

These packages contain human hair,
carefully sorted and weighed.

Nothing was wasted.

Even the teeth were
taken out of their mouths,

by-products of the system.

Toothbrushes, nail brushes,

shoe brushes,

shaving brushes.

If one man in 10
wears spectacles,

how many does
this heap represent?

All these things belonged to men
and women and children like ourselves.

Quite ordinary people,
from all parts of the world.

The Soviet forces
carried on through the Polish winter

to liberate another,
larger camp...

Auschwitz.

I stood there
maybe 30 minutes.

It was snowing heavily,
I couldn't see.

And at a distance
I saw lots of people,

and they were all wrapping themselves
in white camouflage raincoats.

They were smiling
from ear to ear.

And they didn't look
like the Nazis,

which was
the most important part.

We ran up to them,

they gave us chocolate,
cookies and hugs.

And this was my first taste
of freedom.

We didn't have the strength
even, you know, to...

To dance or what,
so we just feebly,

very feebly started singing.

And we were so happy,
we were so happy

that these angels came
from the heavens to liberate us.

Unlike Bergen-Belsen,
which was a prison camp,

Auschwitz was a slave labor camp
and a mass extermination center.

Within its gas chambers,
more than a million

men, women and children died.

Their fate was usually determined
within minutes of their arrival.

The cattle car doors
slid open,

thousands of people
poured out from the cattle car.

My father and two older sisters
disappeared in the crowd.

Never ever did I see them again.

As we were holding onto Mother,

a Nazi was running,
yelling in German, "Twins! Twins!"

A woman came up and she took
the little suitcase from my mother

and she says,

"Listen, are these two...
Are these two twins?"

My mother said, "Yes."

So she says,
"Why don't you say they're twins?

"It's a good thing to have
twins here, in this place."

The next time the Nazi came,

my mother said,
"Here are my twins."

They took us to Mengele
and Mengele looked at us.

The Nazi said, "Here,
I found twins for you."

Eva and Vera
were among the few survivors

of Josef Mengele's infamously
cruel medical experiments.

1,500 of his other victims
died at his hands.

The Soviet army camera units

did not arrive until a few days
after the first troops.

There came a...
There came a crew, a film crew...

...to film the inmates.

Especially the twins.

A soldier, a Russian soldier,
he was beckoning to me.

He says, "Come, come, come.
Film, film, film."

So they filmed us marching
between those two rows of barbed wires,

and because Miriam and I had
the striped prison uniforms,

we ended up in the front.

These children are twins.

When identical twins were born
to non-German parents,

they were confiscated and handed over
to an experimental station.

German doctors injected them
with diseases and attempted cures.

Success in the cure
was not important,

as these children
were written off, unknown.

They had no names, only numbers
tattooed on their arms.

Across Germany,
many more concentration camps

were coming to light.

The Allies recorded
the evidence on film.

More material
for Bernstein's documentary.

Three hundred kilometers southeast
of Bergen-Belsen, at Buchenwald,

the Americans entered a camp
described as a prison and labor camp.

I found out that the
Buchenwald camp was being liberated,

so the captain
that I was working with,

we hopped in and got a jeep
and we drove over

to Buchenwald death camp,

and I started filming there.

It was shocking.
Yeah, it was,

because the bodies of the
prisoners were stacked up.

They were dead, you know,
and they were piled up.

55,000 of them
died because of this place.

Here, Schoker,
the camp Commandant said,

"I want at least 600 Jewish deaths
reported in the camp office every day."

Thugs were appointed as
overseers or block leaders.

People were tattooed across
the belly with slave numbers

and forced to work
on starvation diet.

People were coldly
and systematically tortured.

We would receive a report

that strange groups of people
had been seen on a road.

They seemed to be wearing

some kind of a pajama, and they all
looked like they were dying.

The ones who were seen on the road
were those who were still alive.

Those who couldn't walk
were lying dead on the ground.

Everybody has seen the barracks.

I don't want to go
into the details.

It's a little difficult
for me to do that.

But you couldn't tell
if they were dead or alive.

You'd step over a body and it would
suddenly wave at you or raise a hand.

Total chaos. Dysentery,

typhoid,

all kinds of diseases
in the camp.

Um...

Putrid.

It really...
The smell of the camps,

the crematoria were still going,

the dead bodies piled up like
cordwood in front of the crematorium.

It's hard to imagine

for a normal human mind.

I had peered into hell
and that's...

It's not something
you quickly forget,

and it's a little hard for me
to describe.

Some of the American crews

were beginning to use
color film.

Although, as it was sent
for processing to America,

it wasn't included
in Bernstein's film.

When color came out, that was
the start of 1945, in January.

We were the first unit
to start using color film.

Up to that point
it was black and white.

And it was 35 millimeter.

But when color came out,
it was 16 millimeter movie.

That was sent to the processors,

and then they would enlarge it
for showing in theaters,

newsreel theaters were showing
this stuff in the States.

We covered the people that were
living in a town called Weimar,

and they were paraded
through this camp

to show the death scenes
and the bodies stacked up,

and the ovens where, you know,

the prisoners were put in.

So I covered a lot of that
with Captain Carter.

And we shot a lot of coverage.

German citizens
were brought in from Weimar.

They had to see, too,

to see what
they had been fighting for

and we had been
fighting against.

They came cheerfully like sightseers
to a chamber of horrors.

For here, indeed,
were some real horrors.

These shrunken heads belonged
to two Polish prisoners

who'd escaped
and been recaptured.

Some of the visitors
did not care for the sight

and were assisted
by ex-prisoners.

They had been aware
of the camp and had been willing

to make use of the cheap labor
it provided

as long as they were
beyond smelling range of it.

The Supreme Commander in Europe,

General Eisenhower,

came to the camps
to see for himself,

telling accompanying reporters,

"We are told
that the American soldier

"does not know
what he is fighting for.

"Now at least he will know
what he is fighting against."

Eisenhower arranged
for journalists, Senators,

Congressmen and a British
parliamentary delegation

to visit the camp and publicize
their findings at home.

Towards the end of April,

the Americans, moving close
to the city of Munich,

entered and filmed another camp.

The footage was sent to London,

where it was viewed
in the processing laboratory.

One morning, sitting there
waiting for rushes,

we got a dope sheet which had
the name of the cameramen,

how much film had been shot,

and we looked and there was
an enormous amount of film,

much more than usual.

And at the top of the dope sheet

was a name which was totally
unfamiliar to all of us.

It was spelt D-A-C-H-A-U.

And we didn't know
what the hell that was,

whether it was initials
or anything.

But we soon found out,

because once they started
screening this material,

it was like looking into

the most appalling
hell possible.

And especially in negative,

where the blacks were white
and the whites were black.

There was a grotesqueness
to it anyway,

but to see it in negative
was shattering.

And there was four hours
of this without break.

None of us wanted to break.

And to see
these piles of bodies,

these rooms stacked with bodies,

and there was what looked like

a giant barbecue
made out of railway sleepers,

which, an attempt had been
made to burn the bodies,

obviously before
the Americans arrived,

to try and lessen the...
Lessen the atrocities, but...

None of us, none of us,
could talk,

and I think each one
of us was hoping

that we were not going to be the ones
who were going to cut it.

When it was over,

we sat absolutely still,

and nobody smoked,
nobody could talk.

We had no idea what had been
going on in these camps.

Richard Crossman,
German expert and writer,

was a member of the Psychological
Warfare Division in London,

and was sent to report on
the situation in Dachau.

His experience there

was later to inform his final script
for Bernstein's film.

"In the last three months,

"official records show
that 10,615 people

"were disposed of here.

"Their clothes were turned over

"to the Deutsche Textil und
Beckleichungwerke G.m.b.H.,

"a private corporation, whose
stockholders were SS officials,

"which reclaimed and repaired
the garments

"with the use of unpaid
prison labor,

"and then resold them
to the camp clothing depot

"for the use of
new prisoners."

The prisoners arrived often
in railway trucks,

but there'd been no hurry
to unload this one.

They went away
leaving the prisoners to die

of hunger and cold, and typhus.

We found them like this,

frozen stiff in the snow
alongside a public road.

By some miracle,
17 men were still alive.

All the rest, about 3,000,
were dead.

Germans knew about Dachau,
but did not care.

By the beginning of May,

the scope of Bernstein's
documentary had expanded.

He wanted a director,

and his thoughts turned to
his friend Alfred Hitchcock,

already a major Hollywood name.

Alfred Hitchcock
was an eminent director

and I thought he,
a brilliant man,

would have some ideas
how we could tie it all together.

And he had.

Hitchcock was fully committed in America

and not immediately available,

but he agreed
to join the film later

as its supervising director.

It was to be his only known
documentary work.

I left America

to go to England to do
some war work.

I had felt that I needed

at least to make
some contribution.

There wasn't any question
of military service.

I was overage
and overweight at that time,

but nevertheless
I felt the urge,

and my friend Bernstein,

who was the head
of the film section

of the British Ministry
of Information,

he arranged for me to go over.

Before Hitchcock
could join the Bernstein team,

the Allies declared victory
in Europe.

It was the end of the war,

but the challenges of dealing
with the peace were just beginning.

In the concentration camps,
a huge relief effort

was continuing among the many
thousands of stranded inmates.

In Bergen-Belsen,

army cameramen
were still filming

and sending their material
back to London.

I was...
Had a big temperature,

a fever,
because I get typhus and...

And I was thinking,
"I am dying."

I was thinking, "I've died."

Because there was
a music coming,

and I think it was the pipes
of the Scottish.

I think in front of the Brits,

there went a Scottish brigade
with pipes,

and there was music
I'd never heard.

I haven't seen them,

because I cannot
go up to the window,

but I heard them,

and I was thinking that
I heard so many about angels

and how they're singing
and making music,

and I was thinking,
"I'm in heaven."

It was amazing how quickly
those poor people

who were reduced
to almost animal status,

how they came back to
being human again.

And some of the girls, women,

who really were
in a terrible state,

quite soon started to
dress themselves up a bit

and clean themselves up a bit,

get their hair done a little bit

and get back to being
normal humans again.

It happened amazingly quickly,

within two or three weeks,
I suppose.

These people began
to become human again.

And they'd been...
They had been completely dehumanized,

there's no question about that.

As they logged their shots,

the army cameramen made notes

on what were known
as dope sheets.

One of them commented,

"It is interesting to note

"that as soon as the first
primitive necessities

"of food and rest
and warmth had been met,

"the patients,
particularly the women,

"were immediately crying out
for clothes.

"Clothes became
a medical necessity,

"a powerful tonic against
the dangerous apathy of the very weak."

Uniquely,

Bernstein's film documented
the healing process.

Clothes
was another urgent problem,

so an outfitting department
was set up,

and clothes gathered from
shops in the surrounding towns

were soon being tried on
and gossiped over,

as women love to do.

In late June 1945,

Hitchcock,
released from Hollywood,

at last arrived in London
to start work with Bernstein.

The Americans had been slow
in sending their footage,

but despite this,
the film was taking shape.

Hitchcock's visit
was short but intense.

After seeing the footage, he returned
to the London hotel, Claridge's.

There, he made a series
of proposals

for the completion of the film.

And I can remember him
strolling up and down

in this suite in Claridge's
and saying,

"How can we make
that convincing?"

We tried to make shots
as long as possible,

use panning shots

so that there was no
possibility of trickery.

And going from respected
dignitaries or high churchmen

straight to the bodies
and corpses

so it couldn't be suggested

that we were faking the film.

Hitchcock was struck by the contrast

between the normal lives
of Germans living near the camps

and the nightmare within.

He suggested using maps to
highlight how close they were.

Alfred Hitchcock's...

One of his contributions
to the film

is that he had a particular
conceptualization

of those maps.

He also thought
they were very important.

Because he said,
"Not only should they show

"that the sites of atrocity
or the concentration camps

"were close
to population centers,

"they should do so on a map
that was very simple

"and it should be
like a school's atlas."

We wanted to know
whether the Germans

surrounding a concentration camp
knew about it.

So Hitch did this drawing,
circles,

one mile from the camp,

two miles from the camp,
10 miles from the camp,

20 miles from the camp.

His idea was show the area

surrounding each camp

and show how people had led

a normal life outside.

Ebensee is
a holiday resort in the mountains.

The air is clean and pure.

It cures sickness,

and there is a sweetness
about the place,

a gentle peace.

In this place, the Luftwaffe

or SS Panzer officer
on leave relaxes,

eats well, breathes deeply,

finds romance.

Everything is
charming and picturesque.

But the concentration camp
had become

an integral part of
the German economic system.

So it was here, too.

Able to see the mountains,

but what use are mountains
without food?

Even as Hitchcock and Bernstein worked,

events in postwar Europe
were developing in unexpected directions.

In many of the camps, thousands
of survivors remained, marooned.

Now we were
faced with,

in Belsen anyway, over 20,000
who refused to go.

And the same situation occurred
to other, um, concentration camps

and slave labor all over
the British part of Germany,

and the American part
of Germany, too.

So, all of a sudden

we had another
big problem on our hands,

how to handle

this humanitarian
disaster situation?

I was born in Bergen-Belsen,

in the displaced persons' camp.

Both my parents were
liberated at Belsen.

My mother put together a team to work
alongside the British medical personnel

to try and save
as many as possible

of the thousands
of critically ill survivors.

At the same time,

my father emerged as the leader,

the political leader
of the survivors.

Most of them did not want to
go back to their country of origin,

but wanted to go settle
in Palestine or elsewhere.

The United States,
Canada and the like.

And apparently
the American answer was definitely no.

"We're not taking
any ex-prisoners in.

"We've got problems
of our own."

Britain said, "No, there's
no way we're going to take

"hundreds of thousands
of these homeless,

"stateless people in."

So, that was the situation.

And so now, of course,
I am in heaven.

I am free. I am in Germany,
but I am free.

I can go anywhere I want to.

And I'm thinking to myself,
"Do I go back to Poland?"

It was so bad in Poland,
so bad for Jews.

"Do I want to go back
to Poland? But where do I go?"

And I hear about, at that time,

about Palestine, about Israel,

and I said,
"Those are my hopes."

During May,
June, and July,

many Jewish survivors,

ignoring the views
of the British government,

went to Palestine,

where they found themselves
either turned back

or interned in camps.

The situation of the survivors
was a complicating element

in a rapidly-changing
postwar political climate.

Look, the, uh,

so-called Hitchcock film,
or the Bernstein film,

uh, was made
with the best of intentions

and, at a given point,
became a political inconvenience.

It would have evoked
strong sympathy

on the part of the average
person seeing the film,

of doing something
to help these people,

and certainly film
that was put together

with the genius of a Hitchcock

would undermine their
own political position.

At this time the Brits
had enough problems

with the Jews already.

And, uh...

And if people would have
been shown this movie,

maybe people will say,
"Why the British don't let these people,

"that have suffered so much?
Let them have their land."

Britain's wartime coalition

was confronting other,
more major problems.

A defeated and destroyed Germany,
divided among the Allies,

had now become
the responsibility of the victors.

As the nation most heavily involved
in the task of reconstruction,

Britain was anxious not to further
alienate the German people,

whose help would be vital.

Furthermore, with hints of what would become
known as the Cold War already appearing,

Germany was now seen as a potential
future ally against the Soviet Union.

The evidence on the ground
in occupied Germany,

both in the American
and British sectors,

was indicating

that the Germans had already

been so bombarded
with the message of their guilt,

that there's no need for a film
like this any longer at this time.

America, however,

was still keen to show
a shorter film in Germany

and had grown impatient
with Bernstein's slow progress.

There were secret talks with
Hollywood director Billy Wilder,

himself an Austrian refugee
from the Nazis,

with a view to taking the film
away from London.

In late June, a senior American
in the Psychological Warfare Division,

wrote a confidential memo to
his superior in Washington...

...suggesting that
the Bernstein team...

The involvement of the
Americans seems to have come to an end

at the end of June '45,

when they had really
become exasperated

that the British
were getting nowhere.

So they withdrew,
and subsequently they carried on,

making a much shorter film
directed by Billy Wilder,

which was eventually released
in their own sector.

The film was called Death Mills.

The subject matter was similar,

but the treatment of these two
films was entirely different.

The British film,
Bernstein's film,

was an artistically-shaped film

with a much profounder message

that humanity must take note
of what had happened.

The American film was a
much more hectoring short film

which simply accused the Germans
of having committed these crimes.

At Belsen,
we caught the Camp Commander Josef Kramer,

the Beast of Belsen.

Men or women, they were
the Nazi elite, Himmler's own.

Amazons turned Nazi killers
were merciless in the use of the whip,

practiced in torture and murder,

deadlier than the male.

When allied armies approached, the Nazis often
tried to rush their prisoners elsewhere.

Thousands were suffocated
in overcrowded freight cars.

Many of the dead, and the dying,
were flung into the water.

If the Allies moved too rapidly,
the Nazis attempted to kill their prisoners

so that no witnesses of their
crimes were left behind.

In Majdanek, in Ohrdruf,
in many other camps,

thousands were murdered
just before liberation.

Ignoring
the politics swirling around them,

Bernstein's team carried on
throughout July.

At the end of the month
Hitchcock returned to Hollywood.

On August 4th,

a memo arrived from the
British Foreign Office saying...

By September,
the edit had been shut down.

The unfinished film, together with
shot lists, cameramen's notes,

reels of footage, and a copy of
Crossman's completed script,

was labeled and filed away.

Bernstein moved on,
crossing the Atlantic,

to begin a feature film partnership
with Alfred Hitchcock.

Bernstein's last recorded
note on the film

was a letter from Hollywood
to Peter Tanner, the editor,

saying, "One day, you will realize
it has been worthwhile."

Bernstein's documentary
was shelved.

But the reels of film that he'd used
still had a public role to play.

In the autumn of 1945,

the trials of Nazi
war criminals began,

and the prosecutors found
that they had a new

and powerful source of evidence.

The first trial was that of Commandant
Kramer and his staff at Bergen-Belsen.

Kramer was convicted of war crimes
and sentenced to death.

Anita, who'd survived both
Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,

and who appeared in the
British liberation footage,

was one of those
called upon to testify.

Well, I was
asked to be a witness there, yes,

and I said, "Yes, of course."

I found it was like a theater
performance and we said,

"There are some people sitting there
defending these people?

"Are they crazy? You see the crime...
You see the crime."

Later, in November,
the International Military Tribunal or IMT,

began in Nuremberg.

Here, too, film footage
was part of the evidence.

It certainly bolstered
the prosecution.

At the IMT, I think there's no question
that people paid attention

to the films,
and it informed people

in the courtroom

and confronted the defendants

with a mass of
demonstrable evidence

of their activities
over many years.

We are now ready to hear
the presentation by the prosecution.

This was the tragic fulfillment

of a program of intolerance
and arrogance.

Vengeance is not our goal,

nor do we seek
merely a just retribution.

We ask this court

to affirm
by international penal action,

man's right to live
in peace and dignity,

regardless of his race or creed.

I was
appointed a chief prosecutor

in what was surely the biggest
murder trial in human history.

And it was my first case,
and I was 27 years old.

...will show that the slaughter
committed by these defendants

was dictated
not by military necessity

but by that supreme...

Even though Bernstein's
1945 film had been quietly dropped,

this was not
the end of its story.

Seventy years later,
an Imperial War Museum team

completed the film using
the original shot sheets,

script and rushes
to meticulously reconstruct

Bernstein and Hitchcock's
intended final section.

We knew that it was
a powerful piece of cinema,

and also had been made
by some of the best

film technicians
and writers of the era.

What we wanted to do was
ultimately produce and complete

the work of these
original filmmakers.

This was the end of the journey

they had so confidently
begun in 1933.

Twelve years...

No...

In terms of barbarity
and brutality,

they had traveled backwards
for 12,000 years.

Unless the world learns
the lesson these pictures teach,

night will fall.

But by God's grace,
we who live will learn.