Original subtitles

World War 2 in Europe 1945.

As the Allies swept through the ruins of Third Reich,

they were using film -

for propaganda and as a historical record.

Army film crews were amongst the first to discover

the hidden nightmare of the Nazi concentration camps.

The horrifying footage they captured revealed atrocities on a scale

beyond comprehension and it was made into a pioneering documentary

by a team of top film makers, that included Alfred Hitchcock.

The results were shocking and so politically sensitive

that the film was shelved, on the orders of the British government.

After 70 years, the rushes have been reassembled by a team

of experts at the Imperial War Museum.

Now, for the first time on British television,

scenes from the completed film will finally be shown.

Some of those who appear in the footage - the soldiers,

the cameramen and the victims themselves -

tell the story in their own words.

This is some of the most disturbing and harrowing footage ever recorded.

It is shown here in the hope that scenes like these will never

be forgotten - or repeated.

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With World War II 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 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.

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 road,

they all got off the road, 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 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 the barbed-wire fence,

to witness the first British troops 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 are the British soldiers.

"Help is on the way." And people went just crazy.

It was an unbelievable moment.

Suddenly, you hear English spoken. We should "remain calm,

"don't leave the camp, help is on the way",

that sort of thing.

Yeah, 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, 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...it was not 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.

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

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 were hundreds and hundreds of dead bodies all 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...

..absolutely...

..dead.

There was hopelessness, despair.

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 couldn't 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...

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 were Europeans of another faith and 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.

RADIO BROADCAST: I find it hard to describe, adequately,

the horrible things that I have 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 died. 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.

It's the moment when he describes,

"people no longer behave like human beings",

that you realise 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 civilisation breaks down in this way."

A 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 films 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.

SILENT FOOTAGE

They used the camera in a very specific way.

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

to gather evidence.

One of the difficulties about filming an atrocity or a...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, give some indication of how

they've been killed.

Now, that went against the tradition, previously,

of combat cameramen, where they 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 would be a lesson to all mankind, as well, not just the Germans,

for whom the 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.

WOMAN SHOUTS ANGRILY

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, while 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 guessed, 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 possible,

as quickly as possible, so all 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 the 24th of April, 1945.

My name is Gunner Illingworth and I live at Cheshire.

I am, 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 yourself,

you know what you're fighting for here.

A picture in the paper can't 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'm 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,

Stuart 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.

HE SPEAKS RUSSIAN

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.

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 wrapping themselves

in white, camouflaged 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,

you know, to, like, to dance so they just feebly,

very feebly, started singing.

They were so happy that these angels came from heaven 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 says, "Listen, 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, they are my twins."

He took us to Mengele. 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.

And there came a crew, a film crew...

..to film...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 wire.

And because Miriam and I had the striped prison uniform,

we ended up in 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.

Across Germany, many more concentration camps

were coming to light. The Allies recorded the evidence on film -

more material for Bernstein's documentary.

300km south-east 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 start filming there.

It was shocking, you know. It was, because

the bodies of the prisoners were stacked up,

they were dead, you know, 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 would receive 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 that 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, raise a hand.

Total chaos. Dysentery,

typhoid - all kinds of diseases in the camp.

Putrid.

It really... The smell of the camps...

The crematoria was still going.

The dead bodies piled up like cord wood 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.

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, that 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.

That was sent to the processors and 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. 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.

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 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.

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 the processing laboratory.

One morning, we were sitting there,

waiting for rushes,

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

how much film had been shot,

and when we looked, 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.

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.

I think each one of us was hoping that we were not going to get...

Be the ones who were going to cut it.

When it was over, we sat absolutely still.

Nobody smoked, nobody could talk.

We'd 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.

TYPEWRITER KEYS CLACK

"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 Beckleichungerwerke GmbH,

a private corporation, whose stockholders were SS officials,

which reclaimed and repaired the garments,

with the use of unpaid prisoner 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,

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 over-age and over-weight, at that time,

but nevertheless, I felt the urge.

And my friend, Bernstein, who was the head of the films section

of the British Ministry Of Information,

he arranged for me to go over.

CHEERING

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 was...had a big temperature, a fever,

because I get typhus and I was thinking I am dying.

I was thinking I've died...

I was thinking I've died,

because there was 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 a music I 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 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 be...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 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 this

suite at Claridge's saying,

"How can we make that convincing?"

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

so 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.

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 conceptualisation of those maps.

He also thought they were very important,

because 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 schools 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, 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

to 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 Person's 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,

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 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."

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, er, so-called Hitchcock film,

or the Bernstein film, er,

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 problem with the Jews already.

And, er, and given that you show to the people this movie,

maybe people will say,

"Why the British don't let these

"people that suffered so much, let them 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 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 was 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 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 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 is 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 Orhdruf,

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.

Well, I was asked to be a witness there, yes.

And I said yes, of course.

I found it was like a theatre performance. "There are

"people sitting there 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.

The slaughter committed by these defendants was dictated

not by military necessity...

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 film-makers.

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.

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