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Thank you.

In April 1945, camera crews with the British and American armies entered the

Nazi death camps.

and filmed the horror they found there.

For decades, that film was stored in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in

London.

The documentary was unfinished, with missing soundtracks.

But the directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, had developed a script to go

the pictures.

Tonight, Frontline presents that film unedited, as close as possible to what

producers intended over a half century ago.

They made it as a document to serve our collective memory.

Eleven million people died in Nazi Germany's death camps.

Six million were Jews.

In March 1933, 17 ,264

,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party.

20 ,680 ,000 others cast their vote for Democrats,

Communists, Christians, Socialists, People's Party, etc., etc.

Lack of unity among these parties, supposing the Nazis proved fatal.

The National Socialist Party was in power.

They made many claims.

and many promises.

The German people had embarked on that long, incredible journey that led

seemingly out of chaos to unprecedented triumph.

Promise after promise had been fulfilled.

Austria, 1938.

Czechoslovakia, 1938.

Poland, 1939.

Norway, Denmark, and France in quick succession.

A place in the sun at last.

True, they had lost their trade unions and a lot of books had been burned, but

it seemed a good sort of bargain.

One got to like being told what to do.

Having one's views prescribed, especially if it meant a vista bright

promise of grandeur and conquest.

In the spring of 1945, the Allies advancing into the heart of Germany came

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.

It came from a concentration camp, a waste ringed with barbed wire

and overlooked by watchtowers.

Coming in from the flowering countryside, in spite of the frightful

things didn't seem so bad at first.

Children smiled through the barbed wire, and women laughed.

and waved their hands.

But Belsen camp was vast, and inside was a different story.

They had not eaten for six days, and every soldier's stock of food was called

into use.

Water, too, had been cut off, and so the water cart was the most important thing

to arrive.

Most of the people seemed to be listless beyond hope and astonishment.

Hunger had probably affected them that way.

We discovered that among this stench of disease and decay was something

a bit worse than hunger.

Moving vaguely on rickety skeleton legs, they were too ill.

To eat.

How grateful they were for a kindly word or gesture.

What misery to live amongst such unmentionable filth,

with scarcely the strength to pick the lice which inevitably swarmed over them.

They seemed accustomed to the smell and the horror.

They had seen all there was to see.

Huts were almost impossible to go near.

They were full of tangled masses of people who had died slowly and painfully

starvation and disease, writhing in agony, helpless in puddles of

excrement.

It was difficult to imagine those orchards now, those rich fields where

stolid cattle cropped the juicy grass.

For here, a few minutes away inside the barbed wire, was nothing

but filth and death.

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 thirty thousands.

Here is a pit where the inmates, in order to earn

food, had to drag the bodies of their comrades.

But they were too weak to keep up.

with the rate at which they were dying.

So the pit remains only half filled.

The SS guards in charge of the camp were captured and lined up for examination.

Their papers were gone through to confirm their status, their authority.

each with his death's head badge, each justified by German law.

They were unashamed, well -fed, well -dressed and cheerful.

There were women also on guard in Belsen, volunteers who came of their own

will to do their bit.

Not sickly pale with hollow faces and hungry eyes, but well -fed.

and well kept with a strutting arrogance.

The commandant of the camp, Josef Kramer, was removed for trial as a war

criminal by an Allied military court.

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

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 faces of the bystanders showed just a little of the hate that Germany has

inspired, and some of the anguish, too.

Meanwhile, back at the camp, those who were still living were being attended

Supplies of hot soup were prepared and those who could eat unaided were fed as

quickly as possible.

There had been no water supply for six days.

The Germans pleaded it had been cut.

We laid on water in a few hours, and before twelve hours had passed, had

sufficient to enable them to wash.

Soap was provided, the first they had seen for months, and an

orgy of washing ensued.

A mobile bath unit was set up and provided hot water for baths.

Inmates thought there was a stag at first, expected to be beaten for going

it, probably.

But when they learned that the dream was true, hot water.

And these are the people the Nazis said delighted in being dirty.

But the job of clearing up Belson was a big one.

The Burgermeisters and civil officials of the neighborhood were brought to

witness the scenes that had been caused as part of the Nazi scheme of things.

This is not what they expected.

It had been happening for years.

But they shrugged their shoulders and beat their brows and tried to say it had

been none of their business.

But they were mostly silent.

The SS men are not so spick and span now.

Seven days of being shouted and cursed at and handling corpses by the hundred

are beginning to tell.

After seven dreadful days, the funerals still go on.

There seems to be no end.

They were given an address by a British officer through a loudspeaker van.

Einige der Söhne und Töchter, die einen kleinen Teil der direkten

Verantwortlichkeit für diese Verbrechen tragen.

Ein kleiner Teil nur, und doch schwerer zu ertragen, als es der Menschenseele

möglich ist.

Aber wer trägt die wirkliche Verantwortung?

Sie, die sie ihrem Führer erlaubt haben.

diesen himmelschreienden Wahnsinn auszuführen.

Sie, die sie sich über diese entarteten Triumphe nicht genug tun konnten.

Sie, die von diesen Lagen gehört hatten.

One might ask why all the inmates surviving were not removed out of the

altogether to a large town, for example, where there would be feeding and

housing facilities.

The answer is simply the dread word, typhus.

A mobile bacteriological unit and all medical aid possible, together with 90

medical students from London hospitals, were rushed to the spot to deal with it.

Lack of soap.

and water brought lice to the inmates.

And lice carry typhus.

To get rid of typhus, one must first get rid of lice.

So contaminated patients were removed from their huts and put through a

process.

DDT was dusted over them, and they were washed clean, wrapped in blankets,

and removed in clean ambulances by teams working in relays in a miracle of

relief work.

Two miles away from the camp was found a large SS Panzer training school and

hospital, well stocked with medical supplies.

Strange that these should not have been used by the Germans for the inmates.

Scores still died every day.

They were too far gone, many of them, to digest any food, and there was a

desperate shortage of nursing staff.

Still, one could be thankful that they were not simply being left to rot away

with neglect.

There were children, too, in Belsenkamp, though what crime they had committed

was difficult to imagine.

Most of them had been saved by the women inmates who gave up what little food

they could get to the children.

Meals for these children had always been few and far between.

So they ate what food we gave them with infinite care.

Nothing could be more dreadful now than to lose a piece of potato or a drop of

soup.

Clothes was another urgent problem,

fitting department was set up and clothes gathered from shops in the

towns were soon being tried on and gossiped over, as women love to do.

There was something symbolic about new clothes.

New clothes meant

renewed hope.

They donned them with pride.

Now he can look forward to growing up to useful manhood.

There were more than 200 children under 12 years old found still alive in Belsen

Camp.

To these children, clean, dry clothes and kind words from a stranger were

strange, undreamed -of, mysterious things.

Some had been born behind the barbed wire.

In what circumstances one dare not try to imagine.

Where are their parents?

Here, perhaps?

Or here?

or down here in this pit.

Today is the 24th of April, 1945.

My name is Gunnar Lingworth, and I live at Cheshire.

I'm a 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

here. Pictured in the paper, cannot describe it at all.

The things they have committed, well, nobody would think they were human at

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

I know personally what I am fighting for.

I am the Reverend T .J. Stretch, attached as Padre.

to the formation controlling this camp.

My home is at Fishguard.

My parish was at Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth.

I've been here eight days, and never in my life have I seen such damnable

ghastliness.

This morning we buried over 5 ,000 bodies. We don't know who they are.

Behind me you can see a pit which will contain another 5 ,000.

There are two others like it in preparation.

All these deaths have been caused by...

Systematic starvation and typhus and disease have been spread because of the

treatment meted out to these poor people by their SS guards and their SS chief.

We shall never know who they were or from what homes they were torn,

whether they were Catholics, Lutherans, or Jews.

We only know they were born, they suffered, and died in agony

in Belsen camp.

And so they lie, Jews, Lutherans and Catholics, indistinguishable,

cheek to cheek, in a common grave.

The living have been taken to a cleaner place.

The typhus -infected huts are set afire.

Soon the fire will die.

The smoke and ashes will drift away.

and grass will cover the place.

The barbed wire goes down.

The striped livery goes with it.

Do not imagine this was the only black spot that was uncovered in Germany.

There were over 300 others.

No German can say he did not know about them.

The whole world...

had heard of Dachau, for it was publicized by the Nazis as a model camp

since its inception way back in 1933.

On the 28th of February of that year, the presidential emergency decree

suspended the basic civil rights of the German people.

for an indeterminate period and so eliminated legal safeguards against

imprisonment.

Here were 32 ,000 men of every European nationality.

including 5 ,660 Germans.

From the outside, one might, at a casual glance, have seen nothing remarkable or

horrifying, but Dachau was crammed with three or four times the number it was

designed for.

Here, as at Belsen, men knew hunger.

Men became weak.

Men fell sick until they died where they lay on the floor.

In Hut 30 alone there is recorded, for example, 72 deaths

within 24 hours.

Every day the dead were taken from the huts.

Here, as at Belsen, there were many who were too weak to be saved, too

sick to eat.

Typhus was taking its toll, and truckloads of wretchedness had to be

dealt with in the already overflowing hospitals.

Dachau had its own brothel for the use of guards and favoured prisoners.

As the women died, they were replaced by a fresh contingent from the women's

camp at Ravensbruck.

This was not used as a bathhouse, but as a death chamber.

Batches of prisoners were marched in here to die.

When the chamber was full, the doors were shut and sealed.

A man at the controls let in the poison gas, and another batch of helpless

victims screamed their lives out beyond the grill.

The gas chamber was conveniently placed.

next to the mortuary.

And next to that was the crematorium.

These great ovens were constructed exclusively for the burning of large

of corpses.

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 Bekleidungswerke,

GmbH, 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 had 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.

In Buchenwald, there were about 80 ,000, of whom 34 ,000

were employed outside the camp in an armaments factory.

During the first week of April, 25 ,000 were removed by the Germans to

other camps because of the approach of the Allied forces.

When the camp was liberated on April 13th, 20 ,000 inmates remained.

African Negroes, Albanians, Austrians, Belgians.

Brazilians, Bulgarians, Canadians, Chinese, Croats, Czechs, Danes, French,

Germans, British, Greeks, Dutch, Italians, Yugoslavs, Latvians, Lets,

Norwegians, Mexicans, Poles, Romanians, Spaniards, Swiss, Americans, and

Russians.

Fifty -five thousand of them died because of this place.

People were tattooed across the belly with slave numbers and forced to work on

starvation diet.

People were coldly and systematically tortured.

Here, Shoker, 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.

There was no efficient distribution of food.

One prisoner collected the rations for 10 or 15 men.

Hunger and hopelessness turned some of them into beasts.

Sometimes a prisoner carrying rations back to the hut was waylaid and robbed

other prisoners.

Sometimes he ate the best part of the food himself.

Sometimes he sold it.

Corruption was fostered, for it gave another excuse for killing.

seemed so remote from humanity, so far beyond the behaviour of man.

British members of Parliament came and saw and were sick at heart.

It had to be seen to be believed.

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.

If a prisoner had a curiously tattooed skin, it was taken from him.

We can only hope he was dead when it was done.

The skin was tanned and made into lampshades, etc.

These shrunken heads belonged to two Polish prisoners.

who had escaped and been recaptured.

Some of the visitors did not care for the site and were assisted by ex

-prisoners.

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

In this place, the Luftwaffe, or SS Panzer Officer, or 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.

They were able to see the mountains, but what use are mountains without food?

Prisoners of Dachau and Buchenwald dreaded being sent here.

To them, this place did not mean recuperation, only starvation,

through slavery in an underground factory, and finally, left to cough

life out, unaided and crowded in the filth and stench of a hut, unfit for

but for some reason called a hospital.

The daily collection of corpses was disposed of through this chimney.

Mauthausen.

First used in 1938, this camp was the center of a group of subsidiary camps.

40 ,000 people had died here since the beginning of the year.

Here, the gas chamber held 200 at a time, and the crematorium

dealt with 300 per day, every day.

Ludwig Schlust.

In the north of Germany, it was the same story.

The few who remained alive were staggering on the verge of death.

They were the survivors, and these were the rest, hurriedly murdered lest they

be set free to live a normal life.

The authorities in the camps took special measures to make sure that a man

neither live normally nor die normally.

Neither should he sleep normally.

He was surrounded by barbed wire, and he had to sleep on barbed wire.

Here was carnage and desolation.

Prisoners had been dragged from the sacks of straw in the hovels called

hospitals. Shot!

and hastily disposed of by the first means to hand.

There must have been some feeling of guilt, or presumably there would not

been an attempt to destroy the evidence.

In the outskirts of Leipzig, an effort was made to prevent 300 forced workers

a factory from being set free by advancing Allied troops.

300 were locked in a mess, hut, and burned.

This is where it stood.

Some of the desperate, screaming prisoners broke out.

Flamethrowers and machine guns were waiting to receive them.

This was a woman.

Some almost reached the barbed wire.

Some got there and stayed there, for it was electrified.

This was a Polish engineer.

Gardelegen. American troops advancing did not know that in this barn the

had locked 1 ,800 prisoners and set burning straw alight to suffocate them.

In the morning before retreating, they had poured petrol on the bodies in an

attempt to burn what remained.

It still smouldered when the American troops arrived.

This man was shot because he gasped for air, trying to escape while the rest of

him burned in the barn.

Auschwitz.

The most up -to -date institution was better equipped for killing.

Transports of prisoners from all over occupied Europe were sent for

extermination in one of the special Wernickstunschlager.

Here, four million people were murdered.

As many men, women, and children as you could pack into a great city.

The dead have been buried.

It remains for us to care for these, the living.

It remains for us to hope that Germans may help to mend what they have broken

and cleanse what they have befouled.

Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to

file past the victims.

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 travelled 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.

To find out more about the making of this

Frontline is made possible by contributions to your PBS station from

like you.

Thank you