Original subtitles

'With World War Two in Europe drawing to a close,

'the three allied armies, British, Soviet and American,

'began their move towards Berlin.

'Among their ranks were soldiers newly trained as cameramen.

'In April 1945, an advancing British unit halted

'by the River Aller, northern Germany.

'As events unfolded, they were recorded by the army camera crews.'

I think it was about 12th April.

Apparently two German officers approached our front line

with a white flag asking to speak to our General,

and they were ushered through, blindfolded actually,

and taken to our Corps Headquarters where I happened to be.

And they had a message from their General.

The message was that we were approaching

or probably going to approach a large civilian prison camp

where typhus had broken out.

And their General wanted to send a message

to say that he didn't think it was a good idea if we fought through that camp

because those inmates with typhus would get loose

and would get amongst the civilian population

and the German army and the British army.

They pulled us out up a track,

and we had to hoist a white flag of truce.

This is...

Out of nowhere this has happened.

We were sent under the flag of truce miles behind enemy lines.

The Germans, in fairness to them, on the roads, they all got off the roads,

and they were all armed on the side of the roads as we were driving through.

The more I think about it now, I'm amazed that none of us opened fire.

But in fairness to the Germans, not one of them fired

and not one of us fired either.

'The British camera crews continued to film.

'Their footage was to become part of an extraordinary documentary

'produced for the allies by Sidney Bernstein

'with a team that included the director Alfred Hitchcock.

'This film, called "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey",

'has been described as a forgotten masterpiece

'of British documentary cinema.

'Yet it was abandoned unfinished until now, 70 years later. '

'In the spring of 1945, the allies,

'advancing into the heart on Germany, came to 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. '

Then dawn came up.

And then we could see where the stench was coming from.

I think one of the first things we did

was to line up all the SS men and women

and took them, made them prisoners of war, basically.

The SS were still there.

Josef Kramer was still there, the Camp Commandant.

I looked at the tower and the tower was empty.

And there was always a German there with a shotgun

or with whatever he had.

And I started screaming, "The Germans are gone! I don't see any Germans!"

And some girls ran with me

and we made it to the gate.

I was behind a barbed-wire fence

to witness the first British troop entering the camp.

We had a loudspeaker van with us.

We went into the camp to see what we could see,

and of course what we could see was a complete utter shock

and I'll never forget it.

Through a loudspeaker in different languages, they said,

"Be calm! Be calm! Be calm! Stay where you are.

"Be calm. Help is on the way.

"We're the British soldiers. Help is on the way. "

And people went just crazy.

It was an unbelievable moment.

Suddenly you hear English spoken,

and we should remain calm, don't leave the camp, help is on the way.

You know, that sort of thing.

It's very difficult to describe.

It was, you know...

You spent years preparing yourself to die,

and suddenly you're still here, you know.

I was 19 when the liberation came,

and it was very difficult to actually take on board.

We thought we were dreaming

and every British soldier looked like a god to us.

Yes, well, it wasn't what we expected, to still be alive,

but there we were.

We didn't know what we were going to go into.

We were sent...

...and then we drove.

Excuse me.

Sorry about this.

It's too painful.

'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 30,000. '

We drove in and saw a sight that shook us.

There's nothing, even the sights of war had ever, ever, ever shown us before.

It was pain to look at it. Pain that this could happen to people.

There were hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies sort of piled up.

There was a stench of death everywhere. There was...

pits containing bodies of people as large as lawn tennis courts,

containing babies, girls, youths, men, women, old, young.

And how deep, we didn't know.

These half-dead people walking about,

glazed eyes...

...and absolutely... dead.

There was hopelessness,

despair, the appalling smell,

the whole atmosphere of depression.

Like the end had come.

The bodies, you lost contact. Reality went.

They were dummies, they were dolls, they were...

I don't whether you...

We ourselves withdrew

into another space, time, existence,

but you could never associate what you were seeing with your own life,

if you know what I mean.

This was something completely separate. It was another world.

I don't think if we...

If you had become too involved, I think you'd probably have gone mad.

We were there for about two weeks filming all these sights,

which no film which I have seen since

really conveys the feeling of despair and horror

that can be done to people who are Europeans of another faith,

for no other reason.

And I thought as time went by it might leave me.

I wanted to forget.

But it never does leave you.

'I find it hard to describe the horrible things

'that I've seen and heard.

'But here, unadorned, are the facts.

'I passed through the barrier and found myself in the world of a nightmare.

'Dead bodies, some of them in decay,

'lay strewn about the road and along the rutted tracks.

'On each side of the road were brown wooden huts.

'There were faces at the windows.

'The bony emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside,

'propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before the die.

'And they were dying, every hour and every minute. '

It was so horrific that the BBC initially waited

before they broadcasted it because they had doubts

whether my father had accurately described what he'd seen,

and they checked and then put it out.

It's the moment when he describes

people no longer behave like human beings,

that you realise what he's saying, what the implied message of this is.

This isn't just Germany. This isn't just the people in those camps.

This could be any of you anywhere,

if civilisation breaks down in this way.

'The day after the report, Churchill declared,

"No words can express the horror

"which is felt by His Majesty's government and their principal allies

"at the proofs of these frightful crimes now daily coming into view. "

'The success of cinema in the 1930s had underlined the power of the moving image.

'Keen to exploit its potential role in war,

'Britain and America set up a joint film department.

'Its brief was to produce short propaganda films,

'initially to support the war effort,

'and later to assist the task of dealing with a defeated Germany

'once the war was won.

'In Britain, this unit was headed by leading film producer, Sidney Bernstein.

'The day following Churchill's statement, Bernstein set out for Bergen-Belsen.

'By the time he arrived, the army film cameramen had been at work for a week. '

The film shot at Bergen-Belsen by the British cameramen

reveal every level of humanity...

...to a much greater extent than any other of the film evidence.

It feels as if the whole human story is there.

They used the camera in a very specific way.

There was a... It began to directed to collect evidence, to gather evidence.

So one of the difficulties about filming an atrocity

is that in order to reveal that a person has been murdered or brutalised,

what you have to do is you have to reveal that by getting close to the person

because you have to show the wounds,

have to give some indication of how they've been killed.

Now, that went against the tradition previously of combat cameramen

where they'd shied away from representing or recording

scenes of people who'd been killed or brutalised.

'For Bernstein, the visit to Bergen-Belsen was galvanising.

'On his return to London, he began planning a full-length documentary.

'Its purpose was clear from guidelines he issued to the allied cameramen. '

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.

To the Germans for whom the whole film we were putting together was designed.

To show to the German people.

Because most of them on our way down, and on the troops' way down,

had denied they knew anything about the camps.

This would be the evidence, which we could show them.

First of all, I wanted them to record

that all the local bigwigs and people,

the Municipal Burgomaster and the like,

who lived within a reasonable range,

saw what was being done

in burying these tragic figures.

Some of the Germans we brought in to be filmed,

when the bodies were being buried in the pit,

just couldn't look any more.

I wanted to prove that they had seen it, so there was evidence,

because I guess rightly that most people would deny that it happened.

'Bernstein also used footage of German SS officers

'helping with the worst of the tasks in the camp. '

'There was an urgent need

'to get rid of as many bodies as quickly as possible, so the SS were set to work.

'500 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 inmates 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 army film units had no sound equipment.

'It wasn't until news teams arrived

'that Bernstein was able to access some sound recordings. '

Today is 24th April 1945.

My name is Gunner lllingworth and I live in Cheshire.

I'm at 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 fighting for here.

Pictures in the paper cannot describe it at all.

The things they have committed,

nobody would think they were human at all.

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

And I know personally what I am fighting for.

'Once Bernstein's documentary proposal

'had been approved by both British and American governments,

'he hired perhaps the best-known film editor in London, Stewart McAllister.

'Together, they began to assemble the army film footage

'now arriving in the edit rooms.

'The deadline for completion of the film was set at just three months.

'The news from Bergen-Belsen

'was not entirely a surprise to the British government.

'Soviet intelligence had reported uncovering concentration camps

'in Poland as early as July 1944.

'But as the Soviets had a record of falsifying atrocity reports,

'the allies ignored the information.

'Now, in the light of Bergen-Belsen, the British reconsidered

'and Bernstein broadened the scope of his film

'to include footage from the Soviet camps. '

After the end of the war I worked as a cameraman on the front.

At that time I was a very young man without experience,

without military training.

And suddenly I had the soldier loops of a captain,

a pistol at my side...

An Imo film camera in my hand and one goal in my head.

To do my best to record

the actions of our Red Army.

We walked, and walked...

We were so tired, we were collapsing.

Then our officers told us:

"There is a camp ahead - Majdanek, where they burnt people. "

We burst into the camp.

And...

...killed the guards.

We shot them on the spot...

We kept on moving

because it was a large camp.

There were green barracks on one side.

And there were painted warehouses on the other.

On the right were people.

On the left were warehouses.

What was in those warehouses?

We opened one warehouse. Women's hair.

We opened the second warehouse. Children's shoes.

The third warehouse, something else.

Zyklon gas in barrels. And ashes, ashes...

They stored people's ashes the way they stored women's hair.

The crematoriums were still smoking,

people were still burned. It looked very scary.

God forbid witnessing that.

Those...

who survived did not resemble human beings.

Skeletons, scary, exhausted...

They knew they would be burned next.

'The Soviets discovered few living inmates at Majdanek.

'In the face of the advancing troops,

'the Germans had begun emptying the camps in Poland,

'sending prisoners westwards to camps including Bergen-Belsen.

'The evidence filmed in Poland became part of Bernstein's documentary. '

'Prisoners paid their own fares to Majdanek.

'They thought they were going to new homes

'and so they brought their most precious portable possessions.

'They say dead men's boots bring bad luck.

'What of dead children's toys? '

'Their mothers carried scissors perhaps.

'The scissors are here. The mothers, no.

'But here in this room is part of them.

'Nothing material could be wasted.

'These packages contain human hair, carefully sorted and weighed.

'Nothing was wasted.

'Even the teeth were taken out of their mouths,

'by-products of the system.

'Toothbrushes. Nail brushes.

'Shoe brushes.

'Shaving brushes.

'If one man in ten wears spectacles, how many does this heap represent?

'All these things belonged to men and women and children,

'like ourselves, quite ordinary people, from all parts of the world. '

'The Soviet forces carried on through the Polish winter

'to liberate another larger camp, Auschwitz. '

I stood there maybe 30 minutes.

It was snowing heavily. I couldn't see.

And at a distance I saw lots of people

and they were all wrapped in white camouflage raincoats.

They were smiling from ear to ear.

And they didn't look like the Nazis,

which was the most important part.

We ran up to them.

They gave us chocolate, cookies and hugs.

And this was my first taste of freedom.

They didn't have the strength even to dance or whatever,

so they just feebly,

very feebly started singing.

And we were so happy, we were so happy

that these angels came from the heavens to liberate us.

'Unlike Bergen-Belsen, which was a prison camp,

'Auschwitz was a slave-labour camp and a mass extermination centre.

'Within its gas chambers, more than a million men, women and children died.

'Their fate was usually determined within minutes of their arrival. '

The cattle car doors slid open.

Thousands of people poured out from the cattle car.

My father and two older sisters disappeared in the crowd.

Never ever did I see them again.

As we were holding on to Mother, a Nazi was running,

yelling in German, "Twins! Twins!"

A woman came up and she took the little suitcase from my mother

and she said,

"Listen, are these two... are these two twins? "

My mother said, "Yes. "

So she said, "Why don't you say they're twins?

"It's a good thing to have twins here in this place. "

The next time the Nazi came, my mother said, "Here are my twins. "

They took us to Mengele and Mengele looked at us.

The Nazi said, "Here. I've found twins for you. "

'Eva and Vera were among the few survivors

'of Josef Mengele's

'infamously cruel medical experiments.

'1,500 of his other victims died at his hands.

'The Soviet army camera units did not arrive

'until a few days after the first troops. "

We had received orders to film the liberation of the camp.

But we had no concrete instructions as to how we should do this,

because we had no idea what we would find there.

I don't think that even our military commanders

guessed at the scale of the crime committed

in this the largest of the concentration camps.

The memory of it has stayed with me all my life.

It was more shocking and horrible than anything else I filmed during the war.

The Russians decided to make a film

about the liberation of Auschwitz.

They dressed us in clothes with stripes

over the clothes we had.

And they told us to walk between the fences.

And they filmed us between the fences.

They tried to show everything after the event.

There came a... there came a crew, a film crew...

...to film... to film the... the inmates.

Especially the twins.

A soldier, a Russian soldier, was beckoning me.

He said, "Come, come, come. Film, film, film. "

So they filmed us marching between those two rows of barbed wire

and because Miriam and I had the striped prison uniforms,

we ended up at the front.

'These children are twins.

'When identical twins were born to non-German parents,

'they were confiscated and handed over to an experimental station.

'German doctors injected them with diseases and attempted cures.

'Success in the cure was not important,

'as these children were written off, unknown.

'They had no names, only numbers tattooed on their arms. "

Only now do I understand the importance of the Russian images.

That's almost the only documentation.

The Russians film the camp. It may have been a month later.

But they managed to bring the world

everything we experienced.

'Across Germany, many more concentration camps were coming to light.

'The allies recorded the evidence on film.

'More material for Bernstein's documentary.

'300 kilometres southeast of Bergen-Belsen, at Buchenwald,

'the Americans entered a camp described as a prison and labour camp.

I found out the Buchenwald camp was being liberated,

so the captain that I was working with, we upped and got a jeep

and we drove over to Buchenwald death camp and I started filming there.

It was shocking, yes, it was,

because the bodies of the prisoners were stacked up.

They were dead and they were piled up.

'55,000 of them died because of this place.

'Here, Schoker, 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.

'People were tattooed across the belly with slave numbers

'and forced to work on starvation diet.

'People were coldly and systematically tortured. "

We received a report

that strange groups of people had been seen on a road.

They seemed to be wearing some kind of a pyjama

and they all looked like they were dying.

The ones who were seen on the road were those who were still alive.

Those who couldn't walk were lying dead on the ground.

Everybody has seen the barracks. I don't want to go into the details.

It's a little difficult for me to do that.

But you couldn't tell if they were dead or alive.

You'd step over a body

and it would suddenly wave at you or raise a hand.

Total chaos.

Dysentery, typhoid.

All kinds of diseases in the camp.

Putrid... the smell of the camps.

The crematoria were still going.

The dead bodies piled up like cordwood in front of the crematorium.

It's hard to imagine for a normal human mind.

I had peered into hell in this.

It's not something you quickly forget...

...and it's a little hard for me to describe.

'Some of the American crews were beginning to use colour film.

'Although as it was sent for processing to America,

'it wasn't included in Bernstein's film. "

When colour came out, it was the start of 1945 in January.

We were the first unit to start using colour film.

Up to that point it was black and white. And it was 35mm.

But when colour came out it was a 16mm movie, see,

that was sent to the processors

and then they would enlarge it for showing in theatres.

Newsreel theatres were showing this stuff in the States.

We covered the people that were living in a town called Weimar

and they were paraded through this camp to show the death scenes

and the bodies stacked up

and the ovens where the prisoners were put in.

So I covered a lot of that with Captain Carter

and we shot a lot of coverage.

'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.

'These shrunken heads belonged to two Polish prisoners

'who'd escaped and been recaptured.

'Some of the visitors did not care for the sight and were assisted by ex-prisoners.

'They had been aware of the camp

'and had been willing to make use of the cheap labour it provided.

'As long as they were beyond smelling range of it. "

'The Supreme Commander in Europe, General Eisenhower,

'came to the camps to see for himself, telling accompanying reporters,

"We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for.

"Now at least he will know what he is fighting against. "

'Eisenhower arranged for journalists,

'senators, congressmen and a British parliamentary delegation

'to visit the camp and publicise their findings at home.

'Towards the end of April, the Americans, moving close to the city of Munich,

'entered and filmed another camp.

'The footage was sent to London

'where it was viewed in a processing laboratory. "

One morning, sitting there waiting for rushes,

we got a dope sheet, which had the name of the cameramen,

how much film had been shot.

We looked and there was an enormous amount of film, much more than usual.

And at the top of the dope sheet

was a name which was totally unfamiliar to all of us.

It was spelt D-A-C-H-A-U.

And we didn't know what the hell that was.

Whether it was initials or anything.

But we soon found out because once they started screening this material...

...it was like looking into...

the most appalling hell possible.

And especially in negative...

...where the blacks were white and the whites were black.

There was a grotesqueness to it anyway,

but to see it in negative was shattering.

And there was four hours of this without break.

None of us wanted to break.

And to see these piles of bodies,

these rooms stacked with bodies...

And there was what looked like a giant barbecue

made out of railway sleepers...

...which an attempt had been made to burn the bodies,

obviously before the Americans arrived,

to try and lessen the... lessen the atrocities.

But... none of us, none of us could talk

and I think each one of us was hoping

that we were not going to be the ones who were going to cut it.

When it was over, we sat absolutely still

and... nobody smoked, nobody could talk.

We had no idea what had been going on in these camps.

'Richard Crossman, German expert and writer,

'was a member of the Psychological Warfare Division in London

'and was sent to report on the situation in Dachau.

'His experience there was later to inform his final script for Bernstein's film. '

'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 labour,

'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. "

'By the beginning of May,

'the scope of Bernstein's documentary had expanded.

'He wanted a director and his thoughts turned to his friend Alfred Hitchcock,

'already a major Hollywood name. '

Alfred Hitchcock was an eminent director

and I thought he, a brilliant man...

...would have some ideas of how we could tie it all together.

And he had.

'Hitchcock was fully committed in America and not immediately available,

'but he agreed to join the film later as its supervising director.

'It was to be his only known documentary work. '

I left America to go to England

to do some war work.

I had felt that I needed

at least to make some contribution.

There wasn't any question of military service.

I was overage and overweight at that time.

But nevertheless I felt the urge.

And my friend Bernstein,

who was the head of the film section

of the British Ministry of Information, and a...

he arranged for me to go over.

'Before Hitchcock could join the Bernstein team,

'the allies declared victory in Europe.

'It was the end of the war,

'but the challenges of dealing with the peace were just beginning.

'In the concentration camps a huge relief effort was continuing

'among the many thousands of stranded inmates.

'In Bergen-Belsen, army cameramen were still filming

'and sending their material back to London.

I had a big temperature, a fever,

because I got typhus and I was thinking, "I'm dying. "

I was thinking, "I've died,"

because there was music coming

and I think it was the Scottish pipes.

I think in front of the Brits

there went a Scottish brigade with pipes

and there was a music I'd never heard.

I didn't see them because I couldn't go up to the window, but I heard them.

And I was thinking about how I'd heard so many things about angels

and how they sing and make music,

and I was thinking, "I'm in heaven. "

It was amazing how quickly those poor people

who were reduced to almost animal status,

how they came back to being human again.

And some of the girls, women, who really were in a terrible state

quite soon started to dress themselves up a bit

and clean themselves up a bit, get their hair done a bit

and get back to being normal humans again.

It happened amazingly quickly.

Within two or three weeks, I suppose,

these people began to become human again.

They had been completely dehumanised. There's no question about that.

'As they logged their shots,

'the army cameramen made notes on what were known as dope sheets.

'One of them commented,

"It is interesting to note that as soon as the first primitive necessities

"of food and rest and warmth had been met,

"the patients, particularly the women, were immediately crying out for clothes.

"Clothes became a medical necessity,

"a powerful tonic against the dangerous apathy of the very weak. "

'Uniquely, Bernstein's film documented the healing process. '

'Clothes was another urgent problem,

'so an outfitting department was set up

'and clothes gathered from shops in the surrounding towns

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

'In late-June 1945, Hitchcock, released from Hollywood,

'at last arrived in London to start work with Bernstein.

'The Americans had been slow in sending their footage,

'but despite this the film was taking shape.

'Hitchcock's visit was short, but intense.

'After seeing the footage, he returned to the London hotel Claridge's.

'There, he made a series of proposals for the completion of the film. '

And I can remember him strolling up and down in his suite at Claridge's

and saying, "How can we make that convincing? "

We tried to make shots as long as possible, used panning shots,

so that there was no possibility of trickery.

And going from respected dignitaries or high churchmen

straight to the bodies and corpses,

so that it couldn't be suggested that we were faking the film.

'Hitchcock was struck by the contrast

'between the normal lives of Germans living near the camps

'and the nightmare within.

'He suggested using maps to highlight how close they were. "

Alfred Hitchcock, one of his contributions to the film

is that he had a particular conceptualisation of those maps.

He also thought they were very important.

He said not only should they show

the sites of atrocity or the concentration camps

were close to population centres,

they should do so on a map that was very simple

and it should be like a school atlas.

We wanted to know whether the Germans

surrounding the concentration camp knew about it.

So Hitch did this drawing, circles, one mile from the camp,

two miles from the camp, ten miles from the camp, 20 miles from the camp.

His idea was to show the area surrounding each camp

and show how people had led a normal life outside.

'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 peace.

'In this place, the Luftwaffe or SS Panzer officer on 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.

'Able to see the mountains,

'but what use are mountains without food?'

'Even as Hitchcock and Bernstein worked,

'events in post-war Europe were developing in unexpected directions.

'In many of the camps, thousands of survivors remained, marooned. '

Now we were faced with, in Belsen anyway,

over 20,000 who refused to go.

And the same situation

occurred in other concentration camps and slave labour

all over the British part of Germany

and the American part of Germany too.

So all of a sudden we had another big problem on our hands -

how to handle this humanitarian disaster situation.

I was born in Bergen-Belsen in the displaced persons' camp.

Both my parents were liberated at Belsen.

My mother put together a team

to work alongside the British medical personnel

to try and save as many as possible

of the thousands of critically ill survivors.

At the same time, my father emerged

as the leader, the political leader of the survivors.

Most of them did not want to go back to their country of origin,

but wanted to go, settle in Palestine or elsewhere -

the United States, Canada and the like.

And apparently the American answer was, "Definitely no.

"We're not taking any ex-prisoners in. We've got problems of our own. "

Britain said, "There's no way we're going to take hundreds of thousands

"of these homeless, stateless people in. "

So that was the situation.

And so now of course I am in heaven.

I am free.

I am in Germany, but I am free.

I can go anywhere I want to.

And I'm thinking to myself,

"Do I go back to Poland?"

It was so bad in Poland, so bad for Jews.

"Do I want to go back to Poland? But where do I go?"

And I heard about at this time

about Palestine, about Israel,

and I said, "Those are my hopes. "

'During May, June and July,

'many Jewish survivors, ignoring the views of the British government,

'went to Palestine,

'where they found themselves either turned back or interned in camps.

'The situation of the survivors was a complicating element

'in a rapidly changing post-war political climate. '

Look, the so-called Hitchcock film

or the Bernstein film,

was made with the best of intentions.

And at a given point became a political inconvenience.

It would have evoked strong sympathy

on the part of the average person seeing the film,

of doing something to help these people

and certainly film that was put together with the genius of a Hitchcock

would undermine their own political position.

At this time, the Brits had enough problems with the Jews already.

And...

given that, if you show people this movie,

maybe people would say, "Why did the British not let these people,

"who suffered so much, have their land? "

'Britain's wartime coalition

'was confronting other, more major problems.

'A defeated and destroyed Germany, divided among the allies,

'had now become the responsibility of the victors.

'As the nation most heavily involved in the task of reconstruction,

'Britain was anxious not to further alienate the German people,

'whose help would be vital.

'Furthermore,

'with hints of what would become known as the Cold War appearing,

'Germany was now seen as a potential future ally

'against the Soviet Union. '

The evidence on the ground in occupied Germany,

both in the American and British sectors,

was indicating that the Germans

had already been so bombarded with the message of their guilt...

...that there's no need for a film like this any longer at this time.

'America, however, was still keen to show a shorter film in Germany

'and had grown impatient with Bernstein's slow progress.

'There were secret talks with Hollywood director Billy Wilder,

'himself an Austrian refugee from the Nazis,

'with a view to taking the film away from London.

'In late June, a senior American in the Psychological Warfare Division,

'wrote a confidential memo to his superior in Washington,

'suggesting that the Bernstein team

"should be relieved of all further responsibility for the picture.

"It is our belief that Mr Bernstein

"would be relieved to have the picture taken off his hands.

"And now that Billy Wilder is with us, we are prepared to take over the job.

"He would be appointed producer and also supervising director for the film. "

The involvement of the Americans

seems to have come to an end at the end of June '45

when they'd really become exasperated that the British were getting nowhere.

So they withdrew,

and subsequently they carried on making a much shorter film

directed by Billy Wilder,

which was eventually released in their own sector.

The film was called "Death Mills".

The subject matter was similar,

but the treatment of these two films was entirely different.

The British film, Bernstein's film,

was an artistically shaped film

with a much profounder message

that humanity must take note of what had happened.

The American film was a much more hectoring short film,

which simply accused the Germans of having committed these crimes.

'At Belsen we caught the Camp Commander Josef Kramer,

'the Beast of Belsen.

'Men or women,

'they were the Nazi elite, Himmler's own.

'Amazons turned Nazi killers

'were merciless in the use of the whip, practised in torture and murder.

'Deadlier than the male.

'When allied armies approached,

'the Nazis often tried to rush their prisoners elsewhere.

'Thousands were suffocated in overcrowded freight cars.

'Many of the dead and the dying were flung into the water.

'If the allies moved too rapidly, the Nazis attempted to kill their prisoners,

'so that no witnesses of their crimes were left behind.

'In Majdanek, in Ohrdruf, in many other camps,

'thousands were murdered just before liberation. "

'Ignoring the politics swirling around them,

'Bernstein's team carried on throughout July.

'At the end of the month Hitchcock returned to Hollywood.

'On August 4th, a memo arrived from the British Foreign Office saying...

..."Policy at the moment in Germany is entirely in the direction

"of encouraging, stimulating

"and interesting the Germans out of their apathy,

"and there are people around the Commander-in-Chief who will say,

"No atrocity film. "

'By September, the edit had been shut down.

'The unfinished film, together with shot lists, cameramen's notes,

'reels of footage and a copy of Crossman's completed script,

'was labelled and filed away.

'Bernstein moved on, crossing the Atlantic,

'to begin a feature-film partnership with Alfred Hitchcock.

'Bernstein's last recorded note on the film

'was a letter from Hollywood to Peter Tanner, the editor, saying,

"One day you will realise it has been worthwhile. "

'Bernstein's documentary was shelved.

'But the reels of film that he'd used still had a public role to play.

'In the autumn of 1945, the trials of Nazi war criminals began

'and the prosecutors found that they had a new and powerful source of evidence.

'The first trial was that of Commandant Kramer

'and his staff at Bergen-Belsen.

'Kramer was convicted of war crimes and sentenced to death.

'Anita, who had survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,

'and who appeared in the British liberation footage,

'was one of those called upon to testify. '

I was asked to be a witness there and I said, "Yes, of course. "

It was like a theatre performance and we said,

"There are people defending these people? Are they crazy?

"You see the crime... You see the crime. "

'Later, in November, the International Military Tribunal or IMT

'began in Nuremberg.

'Here, too, film footage was part of the evidence. '

It certainly bolstered the prosecution.

At the IMT, I think there's no question that people paid attention to the films

and it informed people in the courtroom

and confronted the defendants

with a mass of demonstrable evidence of their activities

over many years.

We are now ready to hear the presentation by the prosecution.

This was the tragic fulfilment

of a programme of intolerance and arrogance.

Vengeance is not our goal.

Nor do we seek merely a just retribution.

We ask this court to affirm by international penal action

man's right to live in peace and dignity,

regardless of his race or creed.

I was appointed a chief prosecutor

in what was surely the biggest murder trial in human history.

And it was my first case and I was 27 years old.

...will show that the slaughter committed by these defendants...

...was dictated, not by military necessity, but by that supreme...

'Even though Bernstein's 1945 film had been quietly dropped,

'this was not the end of its story.

'70 years later, an Imperial War Museum team completed the film

'using the original shot sheets, script and rushes

'to meticulously reconstruct Bernstein and Hitchcock's intended final section. '

We knew that it was a powerful piece of cinema

and also had been made

by some of the best film technicians and writers of the era.

What we wanted to do was ultimately produce and complete the work

of these original filmmakers.

'This was the end of the journey

'they had so confidently begun in 1933.

'12 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. "