Historical films, when they stare into the abyss, are always horror films, and none attests to that with a greater conviction than German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. This is probably the most frightening documentary ever filmed, the sheer scope of inhumanity shown in it almost beyond belief if we didn't know that everything was indeed true. A very difficult film to watch, and certainly not for the faint-hearted and Holocaust deniers (not an endangered species here), this is one of the most important accounts of the event whose ramifications remain relevant 70 years after World War II ended.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was made after Germany was defeated in 1945, with Alfred Hitchcock attached as director, but it has been shelved in the following decades due to the changing political wind. After a long restoration project by the Imperial War Museum, the film was released in full last year and had many screenings in Europe this year to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camps.
In Bangkok, the documentary will be shown tomorrow at Thai Film Archive (Public Organisation) at 1pm, followed by a lecture on European history. Unfortunately the seats are almost booked up -- this historical lesson turns out to be a very hot screening -- but you can call the Film Archive on 02 482 2013 to inquire about last-minute availability.
In 1945 after the Nazis were crushed, Allied soldiers armed with movie cameras were sent to 14 newly freed concentration camps to record the evidence of wartime atrocities. The cameramen expected horror, but what they saw surpassed anything they had imagined -- and they captured all of that on film. Decomposing mountains of skeletal bodies; humans clinging to their last breath, reduced to skin and bones; warehouses full of human hair and teeth; and the list goes on. But for all the graphic barbarism, some of the most horrifying images are those of happy German families picnicking on their lawns just a kilometre from a camp -- blissfully oblivious to the stench of dead bodies and perfectly unaware of the crimes against humanity committed within walking distance from their homes. The way people shut out reality -- the most gruesome form of wilful blindness -- is the scariest thing, and the moral lesson of this ignorance is applicable in other places where gross injustice committed in broad daylight is taken with a shrug.
The original project director Sidney Bernstein co-ordinated the massive amount of footage shot by the soldiers, many of them the first outsiders to step into the Nazi slaughterhouses in Austria, Germany and Poland. Soon, the British army brought in Alfred Hitchcock, the master director whose fame was well-established, to supervise the editing and construct a narrative out of the material. All seemed to go well, until the tide shifted: in the post-war climate, it was decided by the Allied forces that a film showing the atrocity of Germany would destabilise the reconstruction efforts among the German people, and thus the film was shelved. Later in 1945, a small part of the film made its way to the US. Through the US Department of War, another great director came into the project: Billy Wilder, a Jewish Pole who fled Hitler to Hollywood, edited the footage into a 22-minute documentary called (very Hollywoodish) Death Mills. It shows scenes of carnage and horror, though it pales in comparison to the magnitude of the newly restored film, which runs at nearly 90 minutes.
In the annals of Holocaust cinema, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is likely to be the most direct, and thus the most brutal. In terms of historical urgency, it was the first film made about the camps, since it was shot at the scene right after the massacre (a companion piece is the BBC documentary Night Will Fall, which is about the making of German Concentration Camps and was aired last year). On a different note, one of the most powerful films about the barbarity of Auschwitz and the likes was Night And Fog, a 1955 essay film by Alain Resnais, which conveys the cold terror of historic inhumanity through archive footage and visits to the camps.
The latest endeavour -- and one that has already sparked mild controversy due to its stylistic flourish -- is the Hungarian film Son Of Saul, a fictional thriller featuring the Sonderkommando, or Jewish prisoners forced to help the Nazis in their extermination campaign. The film is Hungary's representative in the Oscar's best foreign language category and will open in Thailand early in 2016. Decades after the camps were liberated, the horror remains, and more importantly, the moral messages from which contemporary people may still learn.
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
Footage was shot at 14 different concentration camps.
