Why Hitchcock’s horrifying film on the Holocaust was never shown [View all]

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Two women drag an emaciated female corpse along the ground, its head bouncing on the dirt. When they reach a large pit, they stop, give the naked body a quick tug backward to pick up momentum, then hurl it into the hole. The corpse, which looks like a skeleton covered in a thin film of skin, flops onto a mound of decomposing bodies.

The scene, shot at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II, might never have been seen by the public had a decommissioned film, boasting Alfred Hitchcock as a supervising director and British film pioneer Sidney Bernstein as producer, not been resurrected. Authorized in the spring of 1945 by the Allied forces, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey captured the monstrous realities found during the liberation of Nazi death camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.

Yet by August of that year, the film was shelved by British authorities. Everything—reels of footage, the script, the cameramen’s notes—was boxed up and buried in the archives of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in London. A new HBO documentary, Night Will Fall (January 26), directed by André Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and Jasper Britton, tells the story of how, 70 years later, this lost film came back to life.

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With grace and masterful storytelling, Night Will Fall reveals the carnage the Allied troops found in the concentration camps and reminds us of just how powerful bearing witness can be. The film is a poignant, potent addition to the canon of Holocaust history. As Bernstein said in an interview in 1984, “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, for whom the film that we were putting together was designed…it would be the evidence we could show them…. I wanted to prove that they had seen it, so there was evidence, because I guessed rightly, and most people would deny that it happened.”

more at
http://www.rawstory.com/rs/2015/01/why-hitchcocks-horrifying-film-on-the-holocaust-was-never-shown/