(Narrator) in the spring of 1945, the Ministry of Information in London
was instructed to make a film for Allied Command,
documenting the Nazi atrocities being discovered as Europe was liberated.
Producer Sidney Bernstein recruited a brilliant team to work on the production,
including the editors Stewart McAllister and Peter Tanner,
and writers Colin Wills and Richard Crossman.
The film was crafted from footage taken by British, American
and Soviet military cameramen.
Shocked and angered,
they used their cameras to condemn the perpetrators,
filming the victims of atrocities in close detail
and producing a comprehensive record of the suffering of survivors.
The footage was first screened in London at the Ministry of Information
and was seen as damning proof of the criminality of the Nazi regime.
When completed, the film was to be shown in German cinemas
and to German Prisoners of War.
Its purpose was to counter any lingering support for the Nazis
and to make people aware of their shared responsibility
for the crimes committed in their name.
Sidney Bernstein hoped to create a lasting and irrefutable record,
to challenge any attempts to deny what had taken place.
But events in Germany moved more quickly than the filmmaking process.
The Allied government policy evolved from retribution to reconstruction.
Armed resistance to the occupation was limited,
and many Germans and POWs had been taken to sites of atrocity,
or seen photographs and short films of the horrors.
Consequently, the film had missed its moment and was shelved.
In 1952, the unfinished film was deposited
at the Imperial War Museum.
It had no titles, only brief sequences of synchronous sound,
and the last reel had not been assembled.
But there was a script for the commentary
and a list of shots for each reel.
Using the shooting script and the editor's notes,
lWM's team has set about meticulously restoring and completing the film
to the filmmaker's specifications.
This has involved cleaning and grading each frame of the film,
recording the commentary using the original script from 1945,
and assembling the sixth and final reel for the first time.
This film is an important historical document,
and it has been restored, not revised or updated.
Authenticity is integral to this process.
It is the obligation of curators and archivists
to preserve the artefacts and documents entrusted to them
without making alterations which would change their original meaning or form.
As a result, some of the facts are incorrect
and aspects of the commentary now sit uneasily with our understanding
of the concentration camps.
This film is not about the Holocaust or the persecution of any single group.
Jews are only cited as one among many peoples, religions and nationalities
who were victims of the Nazi terror.
Despite these inaccuracies,
inevitable for a documentary made so soon
after the atrocities were discovered,
this is a considered, sophisticated and non-sensational film.
Viewers are warned that the film is very uncomfortable to watch.
That was its intention,
and there is no attempt to shy away from the subject matter.
The camera stares at the most appalling scenes,
made even more immediate by the restoration.
(Narrator) In March 1933,
17,264,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party.
20,680,000 others cast their vote for Democrats,
Communists, Christian Socialists, People's Party, etc. etc.
Lack of unity among these parties opposing the Nazis proved fatal.
The National Socialist Party was in power.
They made many claims and many promises.
'The German people rejoice
'in the knowledge that chaos and cowardice
'have been replaced by a calm, steadfast leader.'
(Narrator) 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 and 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,
and one got to like being told what to do,
having one's views prescribed,
especially if it meant a vista bright
with the promise of grandeur and conquest.
In the spring of 1945, the Allies, advancing into the heart of Germany,
came to Bergen-Base“.
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 smell,
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.
This man had died by violence.
Huts were almost impossible to go near-
they were full of tangled masses of people
who had died slowly and painfully of starvation and disease,
writhing in agony,
helpless in puddles of excrement.
It was difficult to imagine these orchards now,
those rich fields where the 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 30,000.
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 free 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 S.S. were set to work.
500 Hungarian troops captured with the S.S.
were started on a grave-digging operation.
The 8.8. 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 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 to.
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 12 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 snag at first -
expected to be beaten for going near 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 Belsen was a big one.
After seven dreadful days, the funerals still go on.
There seems to be no end.
The S.S. 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.
'Wait! You'll pay for the lost years of our youth.
'Just wait.'
(Narrator) The Bi/'rgerme/lslers and Civil Officials of the neighbourhood
were brought to witness the scenes that had been caused
as part of the Nazi scheme of things.
This was 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.
'My name is Dr Fritz Klein. I'm a medical doctor.
'I've been in concentration camps for one and a half years.
'I was born on 24th November 1888.
'I'm 58 years old.
'A German from Romania.
'I'm speaking today, 24th April 1945.'
(Narrator) They were given an address by a British officer
through a loudspeaker van.
'You, the fathers and brothers of German youth,
'see before your eyes a few of the sons and daughters
'who bear a small part of the direct responsibility for these crimes.
'A small part,
'but heavier than the human soul can bear.
'But who bears the real responsibility?
'You! You, who have allowed your Fuhrer
'to carry out his insane plans.
'You, who rejoiced in his degenerate triumphs.
'You, who had heard of these camps,
'and so had a vague idea of what was happening in these camps.
'You, who did not rise spontaneously
'to defend the German name,
'regardless of the personal consequences.
'You stand condemned by what you are about to see here.
'You will have to atone by toil and sweat
'for the deeds of your sons and daughters,
'for having reared your children to be capable of doing these things,
'and for what you have failed to prevent.
'Whatever you suffer...'
(Narrator) One might ask why all the inmates surviving
were not removed out of the camp 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 'laundry' process.
D.D.T. 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 S.S. 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
among a purulent mass of corpses.
There were children, too, in Belsen camp,
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, 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.
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 April, 1945.
'My name is Gunner lllingworth and I live at Cheshire.
'I'm at present in Belsen camp, doing guard duty over the S.S. men.
'The things in this camp are beyond describing.
'When you actually see them for yourself, you know what you are fighting for here.
'Pictures in the papers cannot describe it at all.
'The things they have committed, well,
'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.'
'I am the Reverend T.J. Stretch.
'Attached as Padre to the formation controlling this camp.
'My home is at Fishguard.
'My parish is 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,
'which have been spread
'because of the treatment meted out to these poor people
'by their S.S. guards and their S.S. chief.'
(Narrator) 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.
The barbed wire goes down.
The striped livery goes with it.
Soon the fire will die, the smoke and ashes will drift away,
and grass will cover the place.
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 publicised by the Nazis as a model camp
even since its inception way back in 1933.
On 28th 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 arbitrary imprisonment.
WORK SETS YOU FREE
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 somehow 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 bath house, 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.
CLEANLINESS IS A DUTY HERE
THEREFORE DO NOT FORGET TO WASH YOUR HANDS
These great ovens were constructed exclusively
for the burning of large numbers 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 S.S. officials,
which reclaimed and repaired the garments
with the use of unpaid prison labour,
and then re-sold them to the camp clothing depot
for the use of new prisoners.
DANGER! GAS! HAZARDOUS! DO NOT OPEN!
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.
TO EACH HIS OWN
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, Egyptians, Estonians,
French, Germans, British, Greeks, Dutch, Italians,
Yugoslavs, Latvians, Letts, Luxembourgers,
Norwegians, Mexicans, Poles,
Romanians, Spaniards, Swiss, Americans and Russians.
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.
There was no efficient distribution of food.
One prisoner collected the rations for ten or fifteen men.
Hunger and hopelessness turned some of them into beasts.
Sometimes a prisoner carrying rations back to the hut
was waylaid and robbed by 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.
All this 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 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.
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 S.S. 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?
ENTERING THE CREMATORIUM IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT EXCEPTION!
Prisoners at Dachau and Buchenwald dreaded being sent here.
To them, this place did not mean recuperation,
only starvation,
tuberculosis through slavery in an underground factory,
and finally left to cough one's life out
unaided and crowded in the filth and stench of a hut unfit for dogs,
but for some reason called a hospital.
The daily collection of corpses was disposed of through this chimney.
First used in 1938,
this camp was the centre 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.
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 would 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 have been an attempt to destroy the evidence.
In the outskirts of Leipzig,
an effort was made to prevent 300 forced workers in 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.
Flame throwers 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.
American troops advancing did not know that in this barn
the Germans 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.
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 Vem/chlungs/ager.
Here, four million peopled were murdered.
As many men, women and children as you could pack into a great city.
Old women were regarded as a danger to the state.
Women torn from their homes,
perhaps for the misdeeds of a distant relative
and packed cheek to cheek like cattle for the slaughter.
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.
This camp was scientifically planned with a view to mass murder.
Vast extensions were still being built-
arrangements of gas chambers, mortuaries and incinerators.
The normal extermination rate was 10,000 to 12,000 per day.
An attempt had been made to destroy the installations,
but Russian troops were able to uncover most of it.
Five crematoria with a capacity of 279,000 per month.
Germans had watched them die, they had wanted to watch them die,
for they constructed special peepholes in the doorways of the gas chambers
where they could observe the effects of the poison gas Zyklon.
Here are some of the containers,
the mask worn by the operator
and the poisons used for injections.
Not only at Auschwitz was extermination carried out on a large scale.
Entire populations of villages were moved suddenly overnight
believing themselves to being evacuated
and finding themselves behind barbed wire in the morning.
CAMP GROUNDS! STOP! SHOTS WILL BE FIRED WITHOUT WARNING!
2,800,000 people were gassed to death here.
Invariably the gas chamber was labelled 'Bath and Disinfection'.
Here one took one's last breath
and disappeared in oily smoke up the crematorium chimney
The firm that built this was not ashamed to sign its work.
Again the ovens, again the bones.
These bones were sold to the Strem Company
for the manufacture of fertiliser.
How many hundreds of thousands of people are contained
in these heaps of human bones?
You see where they went, to the cabbage fields.
No doubt some Germans today can taste what they have eaten
fertilised by their comrades.
This had been going on for a long time before we came.
Here were found 820,000 pairs of boots and shoes.
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.
Tooth brushes. 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 dead have been buried.
It remains for us to care for these, the living.
TO THE AIR-RAID PROTECTION EMERGENCY ROOM
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 twelve thousand years.
Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach,
night will fall.
But by God's grace, we who live will learn.
My first reaction, I think, was very similar
to what most people's first reaction would be to the film,
which is that I was very upset by it, I was very shocked by it.
The story is incredibly emotional and devastating,
but for me, I kind of protected myself from that, really,
by just looking at what they did as filmmakers.
I think it is very difficult to stay watching
the whole 75 minutes of the film all of the way through,
I think you almost have to give yourself a break
and just close your eyes - it is unremitting.
It really changes your view of life completely when you see it.
And I think it's all right to allow people the freedom to leave
if they can't tolerate those images.
Nobody should feel that they have to be subjected to this.
And I think it's important that people do get in touch with their feelings
and their natural human responses to these images.
And dealing with that emotion, I would certainly suggest that...
that you're speaking to friends, and colleagues and family.
And that you're trying to put it into
some sort of historical narrative and understanding,
so that you don't just see this film in isolation.
It may have a numbing effect,
but, in a way, by the repetition of these horrid images,
people just must realise that actually it was like that,
and you can't escape from it, and you shouldn't escape from it.
My name is Peter Lantos
and my connection with Bergen-Belsen
is that actually I was an inmate there.
I was prisoner 8,242.
Originally, Belsen was planned for, I think, 6,000 people.
In the end, there were ten times more,
and during the last few days, there was no food,
there was no water,
and epidemics started on a very large scale,
particularly typhus, but also dysentery, TB and starvation.
As a child of five, I mean, the most momentous events or impressions
were those of physical hardship.
The hunger, the extreme cold,
standing for counting for hours in the wind
in December, January, February,
the lice,
the lack of food,
and later on, the increasing number of corpses
of whom, or of which, my father became unfortunately one.
Belsen was the first camp that was liberated by the British
where the prisoners were still inside the camp,
and therefore the dimension that was found was so unimaginable,
that yes, the decision was taken this needs to be documented.
It needs to be documented in order to use this as evidence
that these crimes have actually happened.
I think that the original filmmakers
were really trying to make almost a forensic case.
They had arrived on the scene and discovered these horrors,
and I think they really wanted to make almost a criminal lawyer's case,
some absolutely incontrovertible evidence.
I think my father's purest intention in making this film
was to create evidence for all mankind.
And he stated that himself,
and it's actually written in the script.
Bernstein wanted to make a film
that could not be dismissed as atrocity propaganda,
as Allied propaganda,
that would show Germans what the Third Reich had done
to Jews and the other peoples of conquered Europe
in their name.
It was a very brave and legitimate attempt
to produce something that would stand as a testament to the events
and also as a sort of guard against future denials.
The project grew and grew,
and as it grew, the political context in which it was being made changed.
And already in the summer of 1945,
not only were the cinemas not yet open,
so it would have been difficult to show the films anyway,
but the local military commanders were noticing
that the German population was getting tired of being told repeatedly,
"This is your fault, you are guilty of this."
It was no longer required
because the anticipated terrorist guerrilla movement
by people still loyal to the Nazis never transpired,
and more to the point,
the people who were running the British zone of Germany,
which is after all the most devastated part of Germany,
the British Allied Government on the ground
need the Germans to help them rebuild Germany,
and you can't keep beating the Germans around the head with their guilt,
if you want to bring them on side.
So, I think the film missed its moment,
I don't think there was a conspiracy to stop the film,
I think the decision was made to make a shorter film available
that they could get out more quickly.
Well, the extraordinary thing about the silencing of this film
was that it also silenced my father for 40 years,
and he said that it was the greatest regret of his life
that he had not finished that film.
LWM's aim in finishing this film
and putting the reels together as they were originally intended
was to bring together this piece of historical evidence
so that we could present it to a wider audience,
but also so that in a sense that the project itself
could be completed, it could be finished.
If you want to keep the spirit of a historical document,
you have to follow the narrative that this historical document had,
and luckily this was still available.
There was a script for the sixth reel,
so all you had to do, it sounds very easy, but of course it wasn't,
all you had to do was to fulfil
what the original filmmakers had intended.
We decided to go back to the original rushes,
go back to the original negatives and the masters,
scan them digitally, and then build the whole film up again.
So we remade the film.
The only creative liberties we've taken, in fact,
have been to add a few sound effects,
but we've resisted the temptation to embellish it in any way.
We didn't add colour.
We didn't add any other elements
that wouldn't have been available to a filmmaker working in 1945.
I admire the integrity of the team at the Imperial War Museum
who've decided, as I understand it,
to stay as closely as they could to exactly what we imagine
my father and his team would have wanted the film to say then.
While it's important that, as a museum,
that we don't tamper with historical evidence,
of course that does present itself with...
does present problems for a modern audience.
So, some of the details about numbers, about camps and locations,
also the fact that the film doesn't specifically mention Jewish victims.
I think that my father,
in his role at the end of the war and in filmmaking,
was walking a very fine line
as a Jew working on film, on propaganda,
being faced with this particular subject matter,
and trying to figure out the best way to tell this story for German audiences
in a way that would get their attention
without playing into what he imagined was innate anti-Semitism there.
So, Richard Crossman and Sidney Bernstein knew
that back home in Britain, there was not a great deal of sympathy for the Jews.
People were not overflowing with affection for the Jews.
There was anti-Semitism at home.
They feared that if they stressed Jewish suffering in Bergen-Belsen,
stressed that the Jews had been
the specific, particular victims of the Third Reich,
no one would pay attention,
because they would say, "Well, they had it coming to them.
"They're Jews after all."
I think that those who wrote the script, Colin Wills, Dick Crossman,
would have been wanting to represent the concentration camp system
as something that was affecting many races and religions.
So it was better to...
place Jewish suffering in the context of more wide-scale suffering
to refer to the Jews not as Jews,
but as citizens of the countries from which they came,
as French, as Poles, as Hungarians.
But of course the Jews were particularly targeted
as we now know very well and understand very well.
So, yes, there is this strange feeling about it,
but I think we should take Sidney Bernstein at face value
that the human suffering in a general sense
was what actually motivated him to make this film.
I think the question of the treatment of the dead,
particularly the way they are handled by the SS guards,
is a very difficult one,
and it is part of the film that I myself have a lot of difficulty watching.
I think that there are several layers to this.
I think that the immediate question of
trying to clear the camp of the enormous number of dead bodies
was just a major problem for the British in Belsen
and that they reacted in any way they could.
I think there was also a very strong feeling that the SS should be punished.
Their callousness, their hardness, their brutality
is so emblematic of the way they carried those bodies,
I think it's another way of damning the SS.
The shower scene where the women...
are allowed to wash under hot water for the first time in who knows how long,
to me that's not prurient in any way,
although I think some people might think it was.
I think it's these women reclaiming their rights.
And the cameraman said,
after ten days of filming these scenes of horror,
it was so good to move on to softer things
and to celebrate the return
of these people's sense of humanity, dignity and community.
I think Bernstein's film
is essential as a historical document
because it shows us what a British filmmaker
with considerable resources at his disposal
could find out, could know,
in the late spring, the summer of 1945.
It is as if you are seeing what they saw in the cutting rooms,
it is as if, almost, as if you are there behind the camera
with those guys who took those amazing images.
I think what this film uniquely does
is give an audience, a contemporary audience,
a sense of the vastness of the subject matter and of the atrocity.
It gives actually the magnitude of what happened.
The actual figures can be disputed,
but there is no question that the film reflects
the end stages of the Final Solution.
Many people speak about learning lessons from the Holocaust,
but of course genocides still happen,
so, again, as a piece of evidence of genocide in the twentieth century
it's incredibly important and relevant.
It is also a call to all of us,
to actually speak up and speak out
when we see this happening again
and this today, in all honesty, is more important than ever.
That, for me, is the biggest value of this film.
The film obviously tells us
that human beings are capable of enormous inhumanity to each other,
but it also tells us
that human beings are capable of enormous powers of survival.
I think we have a responsibility to those who died
to refresh our memories
and to increase understanding of what actually happened.
I always thought that if I survived Belsen,
I'm going to survive, whatever happens, everything else.
So, in a way it was to some extent a source of strength for future life.
I often say that what we've done is to polish up a prayer.
Bernstein, Crossman and Colin Wills
wrote a prayer for humanity
and I think that's what we've done, or I hope that's what we've done.
We've polished up their prayer.