Alfred Hitchcock is rightfully known as the greatest master of film horror suspense, but in 1945 he was confronted with images of horror much greater than could ever have come from his imagination.
In 1945, Hitchcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.
The great director was apparently so shocked by the footage taken in the liberated death camps at Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz that he was unable to work for a period of time.
Hitchcock's finished documentary was deemed to be too shocking by the British authorities, so it was never shown in entirety – until now:
Inzwischen hat das Museum den Film komplett digital überarbeiten lassen, der alte Titel "Memory of the Camps" soll geändert werden. Er sei wesentlich ungestellter als jede andere Dokumentation über die Konzentrationslager, sagte der Leiter der Rechercheabteilung des Museums, Toby Haggith, dem "Independent". Im kommenden Jahr soll die Dokumentation auf Filmfestivals, Kinos und im britischen TV komplett gezeigt werden.
Here is a 53-minute YouTube excerpt which is worth watching in its entirety. The voice of the British narrator is dripping with furious sarcasm as he insists – on more than one occasion – that the existence of these death camps was known everbody.
1 comment
When I clicked to open the Video on YouTube, I was constantly confronted with an advertisement for the World of Tanks Online game series, saying “Kämpf mit!” 🙂
I didn’t know Hitchcock was into documentaries. However I can see why this was considered too much for people to watch. I wouldn’t want to see it in total as it is simply too much to bear for people like us grown up in such a peaceful environment.
Several steps of acclimatization the contemporaries who were involved went through, we have never experienced. Which brings me to the point all the harsh criticism within such documentaries misses in my opinion: You can hardly denounce inhuman treatment of humans, when the system did not consider them to be humans in the first place. What happened simply was the logical consequence of what must follow once the decision makers and its operational forces have discarded all reservations within their plans.
It has more in common with a natural disaster which occurred to specific parts of the population rather than the popular term “mass murder”. Which in turn is also why everyone involved in these operations was able to continue their ordinary and law-abiding lives afterwards in strong contrast to what murderers usually do.