Details
The extraordinary, original cut of the ambitious postwar documentary about German concentration camps masterminded by Sidney Bernstein and a team including Alfred Hitchcock.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945/2014)
Director of the restoration: Dr Toby Haggith, Imperial War Museums
Created by carefully following the original filmmakers’ directions and drawing on seventeen hours of rushes, the museum has for the first time completed the original film, detailing the liberation of German concentration camps.
In 1944 and ‘45, cameramen documented the liberation of German concentration camps. The horrific resulting footage was so powerful and damning that allied propagandists quickly determined that it should be made into a documentary to screen after the war.
At the Ministry of Information in London, Sidney Bernstein assembled an expert team that included Alfred Hitchcock, Stewart McAllister and Richard Crossman, with the aim of constructing the footage into a film. But by September 1945, British priorities for Germany had changed and the film was very suddenly shelved, unfinished.