A very important movie about the Holocaust made its way to New York City for the first time this week at the end of a tortuous journey that began 70 years ago when Allied forces and newsreel cameramen stumbled into Nazi concentration camps. Called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” it is as unadorned as its title, a document shot in the moment to capture forever evidence of the unimaginable.
Made under the auspices of the British Ministry of Information, produced by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television, assembled with advice from Alfred Hitchcock, the movie was meant to ram home to Germans what had been done in their name in the land of Goethe and Hölderlin.
Instead, after a rough cut of five of its planned six reels was shown at the Ministry on Sept. 29, 1945, it was buried for decades in the archives of Britain’s Imperial War Museum. Only recently was “Factual Survey” restored, digitized and completed by the museum’s staff with the incorporation of the sixth reel.
The documentary, shown at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, is therefore important not only for what it is — an overwhelming testament to Nazi depravity — but also for its strange history in which lessons lurk about shifting political priorities and shamed evasiveness.
I’ll start with the film itself, which places the viewer back in 1945, first in Bergen-Belsen. The camera proceeds from leafy tranquility in the approach to the camp, past listless prisoners inside, to the horror at the heart of the place. Emaciated bodies lie in piles. Unseeing eyes stare at infinity. Corpses are tossed into pits by well-fed German guards. Death is indiscriminate, young and old intertwined, amassed atop each other. The narration pauses. Silent screams seem to issue from each inert form to assert the humanity denied them.
Local burghers are brought in; they doff their hats in foul hypocrisy. Of course they knew. A young British soldier can hardly voice his outrage. The camera probes what Hollywood has since rendered in a thousand forms. In their rawness, the images carry a weight no studio perfection can attain.
This is how it was, a “Factual Survey.” Facts matter. As Bernstein intuited, the deniers were sure to come along. They multiply today, one reason the documentary is essential viewing.
The movie is also problematic. It moves from concentration camps in Germany — including Dachau and Buchenwald — to briefer glimpses of the extermination camps in Poland — Auschwitz and Majdanek — without making the connection between them: that by the end of the war large numbers of Jewish survivors of the Nazi annihilation facilities in the east had been driven in death marches to places like Buchenwald. Many of the skeletal figures we see are no doubt these.
Yet there is no mention of the Holocaust, scarcely an allusion to the Jews. Bernstein wanted a movie whose testimony to human cruelty, and call for vigilance against it, was universal; an argument can be made that by making the suffering nonspecific, this message was reinforced. It is also true, however, that the mass murder of European Jewry was an embarrassment to the Allies. In the joint “Declaration Concerning Atrocities” of October 1943, issued by Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin, there was no mention of the Jews, although by then millions had been gassed or shot. Even in 1945, the fate of the Jews was an awkward matter in London.
Besides, other priorities emerged. The Cold War loomed. West Germany was needed to fight that. It had to be rebuilt. There was no point beating the Germans over the head with their guilt. Or so the thinking went. Britain also faced in 1945 the ticklish question of Palestine, where Jews were rising up to fight British rule and demand a homeland. And so a powerful movie, with its own intriguing evasions, met yet further evasions, and slipped from sight into the archives.
The film’s suppression was the wrong call. Living in Germany after reunification, I came to see the generational battle to reveal what the Nazis did. “Factual Survey” might have accelerated that process. Jane Wells, the daughter of the producer, said that her father told her not completing the movie was the greatest regret of his life.
The Imperial War Museum, over-cautious about the movie’s distribution, has produced a 12-minute “orientation” film to follow it. In this, David Cesarani, a professor of history at Royal Holloway College, says: “Many British officials, including in the Ministry of Information, feared that if you pointed to Jewish suffering, if you spoke exclusively about the fate of Jews, about the horrors being inflicted upon the Jews, you would be in some way endorsing the Nazi position that the Jews were a people apart, a race apart.”
This looks like agonized intellectual contortion. It’s unpersuasive. Cut the “orientation,” distribute the movie far and wide, and let it tell every layer of its devastating, ultimately redemptive, story.
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