Belsen:Alfred Hitchcock's Nazi death camp documentary film to finally be seen after 70 years [View all]
Alfred Hitchcock's Nazi death camp film to finally be seen after 70 years
with the Allied forces fought their way across occupied Europe in the Second World War, filming liberation from the Nazis. They captured the joy of freed people welcoming British Tommies, but also the wanton death and destruction of total warfare.
Often at risk from enemy fire and armed with nothing more lethal than a cine camera, they sent the reality of war back home on film.
But nothing on the battlefield could prepare them for the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Combat-seasoned sergeants gazed in mute disbelief at scenes of mass murder, torture and depravity.
Still, they kept the cameras rolling, to record the greatest act of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman, and child), for a documentary that would warn future generations what happens when a nation abandons belief in the sanctity of life.
Directed by the future Granada TV chief Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock on board as an adviser and Labour politician – and psychological warfare expert – Richard Crossman writing the script, it was to be entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.
It closes with these words. “Unless the world learns the lessons these picture teach, night will fall, and by the grace of God we who live will learn.”
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http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/real-life-stories/alfred-hitchcocks-nazi-death-camp-4290653
Their experiences had to have haunted them forever.
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