Sidney Bernstein (1945)

Much of the recent publicity around André Singer’s Night Will Fall presented its subject – the history of a film comprising footage shot by British, American and Soviet army photographers in German concentration camps as these were liberated in the last months of World War II – as a ‘lost documentary’ by Alfred Hitchcock.   The film in question is German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, shown at last month’s London Film Festival.  Night Will Fall and the Q&A that followed the LFF screening of German Concentration Camps clarified the role that Hitchcock actually played.  Although not insignificant, this was purely advisory to his friend, Sidney Bernstein, who, as head of the Psychological Warfare Division of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF), had been commissioned by SHAEF chiefs to compile a definitive record of what had been filmed in the camps.  Singer’s documentary includes numerous excerpts from German Concentration Camps:  this harrowing footage is like nothing I’ve seen before and its power is such that it completely dominates Night Will Fall.   It’s not easy either to summarise the experience of watching these images or to write critically about any other element of Night Will Fall in the light of them (everything else pales into insignificance).  Now that I’ve seen the Bernstein film in its entirety, however, I think it makes sense to write about Night Will Fall largely without reference to these excerpts and to assess it in terms of its other aspects.

The discomfort of watching Night Will Fall is increased by the guilty realisation that part of what’s gripping you is the ‘mystery’ element of what happened to the film shot in the camps.  What happened gradually becomes clear but Night Will Fall prompts other questions, and unnecessarily.  No indication is given of what proportion of the original material now available is included in Singer’s documentary.   According to the BFI programme note for Night Will Fall, Hitchcock informed Henri Langlois, the co-founder of the Cinémathèque Française, over dinner ‘sometime in the 1970s’ that:

‘At the end of the war, I made a film to show the reality of the concentration camps, you know.  It was more horrible than any fantasy horror. Then, nobody wanted to see it.  It was too unbearable.  But it has stayed in my mind all of these years.’

This suggests that Hitchcock kept quiet about ‘his’ film throughout the intervening decades yet the remarkable collection of interviews assembled for Night Will Fall includes one with Hitchcock from (according to the legend on screen) 1962, in which he talks about German Concentration Camps.  Who conducted this interview and who saw it at the time?   There are interviews too with British, American and Soviet army photographers in 1980:  were these conducted for inclusion in Memory of the Camps, the rough cut of the original footage shown at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and on American television’s Public Broadcasting Service the following year?  (Memory of the Camps, which was narrated by Trevor Howard, is mentioned in the BFI programme note but not in Night Will Fall.)  Singer notes that the original film has lain in Imperial War Museum archives since 1945 and that an IWM team, headed by Toby Haggith, has now completed its restoration.  Night Will Fall doesn’t make clear, though, whether this new version of German Concentration Camps is available outside IWM archives.   This last query was answered by looking at the LFF programme when I got home from Night Will Fall.  The programme included the first public showing of German Concentration Camps in this country.  I managed to book a seat.

Night Will Fall does explain the political reasons for putting the Bernstein project on the shelf.   I hadn’t known that events moved so quickly in the months following the German surrender in May 1945 that a Cold War atmosphere prevailed well before the end of that year.  Churchill’s speech in Fulton, Missouri, in which he referred to an ‘iron curtain’ that had ‘descended across the continent’ of Europe, was made in March 1946 but contributors to  Night Will Fall claim that the Western allies decided several months before then to pull the plug on German Concentration Camps.  Immediately after the war ended in Europe, it was felt the film should be shown in order to rub the noses of the German people in what the Nazis had done.  By autumn 1945, the priority was rather, in anticipation of increased East-West tensions, to win German hearts and minds.  According to Singer’s film, there was also nervousness about the effect on American and British audiences of showing them, as Bernstein’s film does, survivors of the camps – and, as a result, prompting questions from the public about what was being done to help the survivors and aggravating the difficulty of dealing with huge numbers of displaced persons in post-war Europe.   Some of the footage was used, however, in the Nuremberg war trials and a twenty-two minute version, entitled Death Mills and supposedly directed by Billy Wilder, was screened in America during 1945, accompanied by what’s described in Night Will Fall as a more stridently censorious commentary than that written for the consumption of British audiences.  The authors of the latter were Colin Wills, an Australian journalist, and Richard Crossman, Bernstein’s deputy in the Psychological Warfare Division (and who was about to enter the House of Commons for the first time).  Singer’s film takes its name from the closing words of the Wills-Crossman script:

‘Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But, by God’s grace, we who live will learn.’

The witnesses who appear in Night Will Fall, whether concentration camp survivors or soldiers who saw what had gone on in the camps, are eloquent and affecting.  One of the most remarkable features of Singer’s film is that the testimony and recollections of some of the survivors are accompanied by shots from German Concentration Camps which focus on a face in the crowd in a camp in 1945 – this proves to be the face of the person now giving the interview to André Singer.  Helena Bonham Carter narrates the film intelligently.  Her voice expresses an awareness of the extraordinary power of the material – she speaks tentatively, as if trying to master a foreign language.

From the seventeen hours of rushes in the IWM archives, the restoration director, Toby Haggith, and his colleagues, following the original written instructions on how the material was to be edited, have now produced the restored version of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, which runs seventy-two minutes.  Some sound effects have been added, from contemporary recordings of the sounds in question, but there is no music, even though the IWM team thinks it likely that, if the film had been released in 1945, a score would have been added.  I think the lack of music makes sense:  it’s in keeping with what Toby Haggith clearly considers to be the film archivist-restorer’s fundamental responsibility to present original material in a technically optimal state but without ‘authorial’ embellishment or reinterpretation – without attempting, in other words, to impose what the restorer might see as substantive improvements to the original.

Adherence to this principle in respect of the Wills-Crossman script is a rather more difficult matter.  It means, as David Walsh, the restoration producer, made clear in his detailed introduction to the LFF screening, that factual errors in the original commentary remain.  It also makes the job of narrating the film more challenging:  Toby Haggith acknowledged in the Q&A that followed the screening that the Wills-Crossman script, in its condemnation of the Germans, is heavily ironic – and it’s a somewhat dated form of irony.  It’s difficult for a present-day narrator fully to embrace this tone without sounding falsely theatrical or as if he or she is satirising the 1945 narrative voice.  In the circumstances, Jasper Britton does a good, judicious job of reading the words.  The restored film received its first screening at this year’s Berlin Film Festival and has been shown at several other festivals subsequently.  David Walsh explained that IWM was now considering the possibilities for releasing the film more widely.  (It’s available for rental from IWM to secondary and tertiary education institutions but not to individuals.)

I’ve kept avoiding writing about the heart of the film because it’s so hard to write about.  These are just a few observations.  A prologue describes Hitler’s coming to power in Germany:  this kind of scene-setting now seems familiar and perhaps that makes the unique footage that it introduces all the more disorienting.  The corpses in the camps often seem horribly alive – not only in their accusatory facial expressions but in the way the dead bodies seem to cling to the backs of the soldiers yanking them into burial pits (these include German soldiers, who were forced by the Allies to do some of this work).  The section on Majdanek includes shots of the Nazis’ stockpiles of brushes, spectacles, hair, shoes, dentures etc:  nothing was wasted, nothing destroyed, except the human beings to whom these things belonged.  The Nazis set fire to another camp and the film shows the bodies of some of the prisoners who tried to escape – emaciated and burned.  The mixture of sadism and of trying to destroy the evidence that was at work here is bewildering.  Sequences shot immediately outside the camps are shocking in a different way.  The British army cameramen photographed well-fed cows grazing on the outskirts of Belsen.  The local population, whom the Allied forces insisted should visit the camp to see what had gone on there, arrive like grinning tourists; you feel a furious vindictive pleasure in seeing the smile wiped off their faces.   Around half of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey comprises Belsen footage:  the film isn’t structurally imaginative – you could say that it turns into a list.  But the repetition of appalling facts and images doesn’t inure the viewer to them:  it makes them more appalling.

I didn’t know just how many camps there were:  their number and geographical extent are well illustrated by the simple map that’s used to punctuate the episodes of German Concentration Camps.  Toby Haggith explained that the map was Hitchcock’s idea and acknowledged it was a good one; but Haggith also expressed some frustration at the promotion of the film as the work of Hitchcock.   Night Will Fall had already made clear that Hitchcock’s commitments in Hollywood during 1945 meant that he could spend only a couple of weeks in London to advise Sidney Bernstein and his colleagues:  Hitchcock’s suggestions included advice on how best to edit the material in order to minimise the risk of accusations that the footage had been faked.   But he didn’t see the rough cut – in Toby Haggith’s view, that’s enough to mean that he can’t be considered in any meaningful sense a ‘director’ of German Concentration Camps:  ‘The trouble is,’ Haggith said, with some exasperation, ‘we’re obsessed with auteurism …‘:  he went on to say that Death Mills has been similarly presented as the work of Billy Wilder when, according to Haggith, the primary director was the less well-known Hans Burger.

At the end of the Q&A, Haggith was invited to say a few concluding words.  He praised the makers of the original film – for their empathy with the survivors of the camps and for how their work ‘challenges our current sensibilities’.  (It was a pity there wasn’t time for him to expand on what he meant by that phrase.)  He expressed an evidently deeply-felt admiration for the crucial contribution of cameramen and editors to a documentary enterprise such as this one.  I’d heard Toby Haggith speak at BFI before[1] but his combination of passion and knowledge in talking about German Concentration Camps was something else:  he’s an impressive man.  His colleagues David Walsh and George Smith, the restoration editor, were also well worth listening to, and Clyde Jeavons did a good job of chairing proceedings at the screening.  This was one Q&A that I wasn’t going to skip and several of the audience contributions were interesting although one was disturbing.  This was from someone who made a big deal of the inflated number of Jews murdered in the Auschwitz gas chambers quoted in the film (even though David Walsh had already warned in his introduction that there would be some uncorrected factual errors).  The final contribution to the Q&A came from a woman whose father was a British soldier stationed in Hamburg until 1947.  He witnessed the screening there of what may have been Death Mills, with a German soundtrack.  He told his daughter that the German audience didn’t believe what they were seeing and hearing.

19 September 2014 (Night Will Fall) – 13 October 2014 (German Concentration Camps Factual Survey)

[1] See note on Triumph of the Will.