Alfred Hitchcock's unseen Holocaust documentary to be screened

[dipsydoodle]

t's a little known fact that the great director made a film about the Nazi death camps – but, horrified by the footage he saw, the documentary was never shown. Now it is to be released. Geoffrey Macnab reports.

The British Army Film Unit cameramen who shot the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945 used to joke about the reaction of Alfred Hithcock to the horrific footage they filmed. When Hitchcock first saw the footage, the legendary British director was reportedly so traumatised that he stayed away from Pinewood Studios for a week. Hitchcock may have been the king of horror movies but he was utterly appalled by "the real thing".

In 1945, Hithcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans' noses in their own guilt wouldn't help with postwar reconstruction.

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/features/alfred-hitchcocks-unseen-holocaust-documentary-to-be-screened-9044945.html

[RainDog]

1. is this the one?

[dipsydoodle]

4. Could be.

The article in the Independent today implies general screening.

[muriel_volestrangler]

6. That looks like the PBS broadcast

The article says there was one reel out of six missing from that, which will now get added back.

[dipsydoodle]

14. I'm wondering if it will be re-edited and a new soundtrack added.

Not that I've got anything against Trevor Howard's narrative.

[muriel_volestrangler]

15. It does say there'll be a new narration with the original script

It doesn't seem to specify if they're re-editing or not - but it sounds a bit as if it's the final product that was kept, with one reel temporarily lost, so they wouldn't have anything to add back in apart from that reel.

[raccoon]

9. I just watched it. Thanks for posting. That was very powerful. nt

[babydollhead]

10. I just watched the whole thing

I have been working with the local Holocaust Center, leading glass mosaic workshops for survivors. Two of them were in the same concentration camp, one was only two years old, the other, is 94 right now, they are a tough group of no nonsense people. I know nothing. They went crazy when I told them I did not want my children to learn about the Holocaust. "How old were they when you decided you didn't want them to learn?"
they asked me, confounded. "When they were born."
I didn't mean I didn't want them to know. I meant it was mind blowing in 5th grade when I learned, and I dreaded them finding out how horrible we humans can be to each other. I knew they would learn. but I was sad to bring new life into a world so scary. They grew up, they know. They are good young adults and this is the world they have been born into.

[RainDog]

11. I saw it some time ago

and it was one of the most devastating reports on the time that I'd seen because it was so "of the moment."

I've seen Shoah, also, by Lanzmann...all nine plus hours. I still have it on video.

It's still hard to understand how people could have done this to others, and how so many could just benignly neglect to care.

when I was a kid, I remember thinking that East Germany had been the Nazis and West Germany had been on the allies' side, because I couldn't imagine that the U.S. would have a current ally that had been a part of the Nazi side of the war. I wondered how any nation could live with itself after something like that.

of course, I read about slavery here and wonder the same thing.

[babydollhead]

12. that is always the kicker

its still happening. it is still some people seeing "the other is evil" . there is no other. there is the species of humanity and we are all capable of good as well as evil. Be kind, is what I hoped to teach my children. do something good in this world. at least don't hurt anybody.

[Packerowner740]

17. It is amazing the horror man can inflict on fellow man

[Tx4obama]

2. ...

[LuvNewcastle]

3. In a sense, I'd like to see it, but I have a very hard time watching

footage of the Nazi death camps. It feels like I'm looking evil in the face, and I suppose I am. I'd have to be in a certain frame of mind to watch that, and I don't get in that mood very often.

[dipsydoodle]

5. Yes

Extremely difficult / distressing to watch but equally important to do so. We've had odd clips from this over the years in documentaries here in the UK. I can only watch such content for limited periods.

[dembotoz]

7. i would like to see it released but i don't know if i would see it

[mucifer]

8. Yeah especially since I know they wanted me in those camps and distant relatives died there.

It gets personal. I remember trying to watch "triumph of the will" with a Jewish group in college. We had to turn it off.

[COLGATE4]

13. And the real frosting on the cake is

that Bergen-Belsen wasn't even one of the extermination camps. Those advanced killing factories were all located in Poland.

[dipsydoodle]

16. Polish camps were liberated by the Red Army.

Given their hatred of the Nazis I guess in their case the guards would've joined the inmates in the burial pits.

[COLGATE4]

19. Would be nice to think so, but in most cases

the Nazi bastards had fled before the Russians arrived.

[zappaman]

18. I also recommend THE ACT OF KILLING.

IMO, the best documentary of last year..
I had no idea Hitchcock did this and will look out for it.
Kick and Rec!

[jtuck004]

20. One of my neighbors was Airborne, part of the forces that parachuted into various places,

fought in the Battle of the Bulge, and among those things liberated one of these camps.

He talks about opening the boxcars, full of people who had been locked in there and starved to death. We were talking about it one day, he kind of laughed a bit, said a few of the townspeople, women and men, were shot simply from the anger of the soldiers after finding this.

Easy to see why.