Alfred Hitchcock types a
script on a portable typewriter his apartment in the Wilshire Palms.
Hitchcock wanted his film on the Holocaust to be as believable and
irrefutable as possible—to ensure that the massacre of 11 million people
would never be forgotten.Peter Stackpole/The LIFE Picture
Collection/Getty/HBO
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.
In the spring of 1945, British, American and Soviet troops
were headed toward Berlin in the final days of the war. Along with them
were soldiers who’d been trained as cameramen—young, brawny men with
cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and large, boxy cameras hoisted
up on their shoulders, who arrived at concentration camps during their
liberation to record the harrowing aftermath of the atrocities there.
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