(EXPLOSIONS)
FEMALE NARRATOR: With World War II in Europe drawing to a close,
the three allied armies, British, Soviet and American,
began their move towards Berlin.
(GUNFIRE)
(EXPLOSION)
Among their ranks were soldiers newly trained as cameramen.
In April 1945, an advancing British unit
halted by the river Aare, Northern Germany.
As events unfolded, they were recorded by the army camera crews.
LEONARD BERNEY: I think it was about the 12th of 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.
(INAUDIBLE)
They pulled us out, up a track,
and we had to hoist a white flag of truce.
(SCOFFING) 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 road, they all got off the road
and they were all armed on the sides 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.
NARRATOR: 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.
(CAMERA WHIRRING)
MALE NARRATOR: In the spring of 1945,
the Allies advancing into the heart of 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,
and I am behind a barbed wire fence
to witness the first British troop
entering the camp.
BERNEY: 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.
SALINGER: 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 are the British soldiers. Help is on the way."
And people went just crazy.
(INAUDIBLE)
ANITA LASKER-WALLFISCH: It was an unbelievable moment.
Suddenly you hear English spoken.
"We should remain calm, don't leave the camp, help is on the way,"
you know, that sort of thing.
Yeah, it's very difficult to describe. It was, you know...
You've spent years preparing yourself to die
and suddenly you're still here, you know. (CHUCKLES)
I was 19 when the Liberation came
and, I mean, it was very difficult to actually take on board.
We thought we were dreaming, really,
and every British soldier looked like a God to us.
Yeah. Well, it was, uh...
It was not what we expected, to still be alive, but there we were.
LEONARD: We didn't know what we were going to go into.
We were sent...
Um, and then we drove...
(VOICE BREAKS) Excuse me.
Sorry about this.
Too painful.
(CAMERA WHIRRING)
MALE NARRATOR: 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 as 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 was hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies
sort of piled up.
There were... There was a stench of death everywhere.
There were 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.
(CAMERA WHIRRING)
WILLIAM LAWRIE: These half-dead people walking about,
glazed eyes and...
Absolutely...
Dead.
There was hopelessness.
The stare,
the appalling smell,
the whole atmosphere of depression.
Like the end had come.
The bodies... You lost contact with reality.
They were dummies, they were dolls, they were...
I don't know whether 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 you had become too involved,
I think you would 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.
RICHARD DIMBLEBY: (ON RADIO) I find it hard to describe adequately
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 they die.
And they were dying, every hour and every minute.
It was so horrific that the BBC initially
waited before they broadcast it,
because they had doubts
whether my father had actually
accurately described what he'd seen.
And they checked and then put it out.
DAVID DIMBLEBY: It's the moment when he describes,
"People no longer behave like human beings"
that you realize what he's actually 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 civilization breaks down in this way.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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.
(INAUDIBLE)
TOBY HAGGITH: They used the camera in a very specific way.
There was a...
It began to be 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 brutalized,
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 brutalized.
FEMALE NARRATOR: For Bernstein,
the visit to Bergen-Belsen was galvanizing.
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.
As to the Germans,
the whole film that we were putting together
was designed to show to the German people.
Because most of them on their 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.
(SHOUTING INDISTINCTLY)
BERNSTEIN: First of all, I...
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.
(INDISTINCT SHOUTING CONTINUES)
Some of the Germans we brought in to be filmed
when the bodies were being buried in the pit,
just couldn't look anymore.
I wanted to prove that they had seen it, so there was evidence,
because I guessed rightly that most people would deny that it happened.
FEMALE NARRATOR: Bernstein also used footage of German SS officers
helping with the worst of the tasks in the camp.
MALE NARRATOR: 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.
(CHEERING)
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 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 the 24th of April, 1945.
My name is Gunner Illingworth, 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, well,
nobody'd think they were human at all.
We actually know now what has been going on in these camps.
And I know personally what I'm fighting for.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 their 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.
(SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN)
(MATVEY GERSHMAN SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN)
FEMALE NARRATOR: The Soviets discovered few living inmates at Majdanek.
In the face of the advancing troops,
the Germans had begun emptying their camps in Poland,
sending prisoners westwards to camps including Bergen-Belsen.
The evidence filmed in Poland became part of Bernstein's documentary.
MALE NARRATOR: 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 10 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: The Soviet forces carried on through the Polish winter
to liberate another, larger camp...
Auschwitz.
(WIND WHOOSHING)
EVA MOZES KOR: 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 wrapping themselves 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.
We didn't have the strength even, you know, to...
To dance or what, so we just feebly,
very feebly started singing.
(SNIFFLES)
And we were so happy, we were so happy
that these angels came from the heavens to liberate us.
FEMALE NARRATOR: Unlike Bergen-Belsen, which was a prison camp,
Auschwitz was a slave labor camp and a mass extermination center.
Within its gas chambers, more than a million
men, women and children died.
Their fate was usually determined within minutes of their arrival.
EVA: 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 onto 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 says,
"Listen, are these two... Are these two twins?"
My mother said, "Yes."
So she says, "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 found twins for you."
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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.
(ALEXANDER VORONSTOV SPEAKING IN RUSSIAN)
(TOMY SHACHAM SPEAKING HEBREW)
There came a... There came a crew, a film crew...
(STAMMERING) ...to film the inmates.
Especially the twins.
A soldier, a Russian soldier, he was beckoning to me.
He says, "Come, come, come. Film, film, film."
So they filmed us marching between those two rows of barbed wires,
and because Miriam and I had the striped prison uniforms,
we ended up in the front.
MALE NARRATOR: 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.
(SPEAKING HEBREW)
FEMALE NARRATOR: Across Germany, many more concentration camps
were coming to light.
The Allies recorded the evidence on film.
More material for Bernstein's documentary.
Three hundred kilometers southeast of Bergen-Belsen, at Buchenwald,
the Americans entered a camp described as a prison and labor camp.
ARTHUR MAINZER: I found out that the Buchenwald camp was being liberated,
so the captain that I was working with,
we hopped in and got a jeep and we drove over
to Buchenwald death camp,
and I started filming there.
MAINZER: It was shocking. Yeah, it was,
because the bodies of the prisoners were stacked up.
They were dead, you know, and they were piled up.
MALE NARRATOR: 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 would receive a report
that strange groups of people had been seen on a road.
They seemed to be wearing
some kind of a pajama, 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.
Um...
Putrid.
It really... 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 and that's...
It's not something you quickly forget,
and it's a little hard for me to describe.
(CAMERA SHUTTER CLICKS)
FEMALE NARRATOR: Some of the American crews
were beginning to use color film.
Although, as it was sent for processing to America,
it wasn't included in Bernstein's film.
When color came out, that was the start of 1945, in January.
We were the first unit to start using color film.
Up to that point it was black and white.
And it was 35 millimeter.
But when color came out, it was 16 millimeter movie.
That was sent to the processors,
and then they would enlarge it for showing in theaters,
newsreel theaters 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, you know,
the prisoners were put in.
So I covered a lot of that with Captain Carter.
And we shot a lot of coverage.
MALE NARRATOR: 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 labor it provided
as long as they were beyond smelling range of it.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 publicize 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 the 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,
and 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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.
(TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACKING)
MALE NARRATOR: "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 Beckleichungwerke G.m.b.H.,
"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'd 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 how we could tie it all together.
And he had.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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.
(SEAGULLS SQUAWKING)
ALFRED HITCHCOCK: 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,
he arranged for me to go over.
(ALL CHEERING)
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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.
BRANKO LUSTIG: I was... Had a big temperature,
a fever, because I get typhus and...
And I was thinking, "I am dying."
I was thinking, "I've died."
Because there was a music coming,
and I think it was the pipes of the Scottish.
I think in front of the Brits,
there went a Scottish brigade with pipes,
and there was music I'd never heard.
I haven't seen them,
because I cannot go up to the window,
but I heard them,
and I was thinking that I heard so many about angels
and how they're singing and making 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 little 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.
And they'd been... They had been completely dehumanized,
there's no question about that.
FEMALE NARRATOR: As they logged their shots,
the army cameramen made notes
on what were known as dope sheets.
(TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACKING)
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.
MALE NARRATOR: 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 this suite in Claridge's and saying,
"How can we make that convincing?"
We tried to make shots as long as possible,
use 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 it couldn't be suggested
that we were faking the film.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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's...
One of his contributions to the film
is that he had a particular conceptualization
of those maps.
He also thought they were very important.
Because he said, "Not only should they show
"that the sites of atrocity or the concentration camps
"were close to population centers,
"they should do so on a map that was very simple
"and it should be like a school's atlas."
We wanted to know whether the Germans
surrounding a concentration camp knew about it.
So Hitch did this drawing, circles,
one mile from the camp,
two miles from the camp, 10 miles from the camp,
20 miles from the camp.
His idea was show the area
surrounding each camp
and show how people had led
a normal life outside.
MALE NARRATOR: 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.
(INAUDIBLE)
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?
FEMALE NARRATOR: Even as Hitchcock and Bernstein worked,
events in postwar Europe were developing in unexpected directions.
In many of the camps, thousands of survivors remained, marooned.
BERNEY: Now we were faced with,
in Belsen anyway, over 20,000 who refused to go.
And the same situation occurred to other, um, concentration camps
and slave labor 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?
MENACHEM ROSENSAFT: 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.
BERNEY: 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, "No, 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 hear about, at that time,
about Palestine, about Israel,
and I said, "Those are my hopes."
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 postwar political climate.
ROSENSAFT: Look, the, uh,
so-called Hitchcock film, or the Bernstein film,
uh, 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, uh...
And if people would have been shown this movie,
maybe people will say, "Why the British don't let these people,
"that have suffered so much? Let them have their land."
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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 already 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.
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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... -(TYPEWRITER CLACKING)
...suggesting that the Bernstein team...
(READING)
GLADSTONE: The involvement of the Americans seems to have come to an end
at the end of June '45,
when they had 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.
MALE NARRATOR: At Belsen, we caught the Camp Commander Josef Kramer,
the Beast of Belsen.
(INAUDIBLE)
Men or women, they were the Nazi elite, Himmler's own.
Amazons turned Nazi killers were merciless in the use of the whip,
practiced 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.
(SPEAKING IN GERMAN)
FEMALE NARRATOR: 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...
(READING)
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 labeled 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 realize 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.
(GAVEL RAPPING)
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'd survived both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen,
and who appeared in the British liberation footage,
was one of those called upon to testify.
LASKER-WALLFISCH: Well, I was asked to be a witness there, yes,
and I said, "Yes, of course."
I found it was like a theater performance and we said,
"There are some people sitting there defending these people?
"Are they crazy? You see the crime... You see the crime."
FEMALE NARRATOR: Later, in November, the International Military Tribunal or IMT,
began in Nuremberg.
Here, too, film footage was part of the evidence.
(INAUDIBLE)
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.
(CLEARS THROAT)
This was the tragic fulfillment
of a program 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.
BENJAMIN FERENCZ: 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...
FEMALE NARRATOR: Even though Bernstein's 1945 film had been quietly dropped,
this was not the end of its story.
Seventy 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.
MALE NARRATOR: 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 traveled 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.
(SOFT MUSIC PLAYING)