In 1945, Alfred Hitchcock advised on a film that would catalogue the atrocities uncovered in concentration camps by Allied troops. Now the Imperial War Museum has completed the film with previously unseen footage

Skeletal figures, too weak to move, wait limply for help. At gunpoint, blank-faced SS officers manhandle the twisted bodies of the prisoners they starved to death, slinging them into gigantic burial pits that will eventually be filled with thousands of corpses. Bullet-riddled bodies and skulls smashed into grotesque shapes line country roads. Having frantically tried to dig his way out of a barn where hundreds were being burned to death, a man’s body lies wedged under a wall where he was shot by German troops.

The catalogue of horrors uncovered by the film German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is unremitting, but they remained unseen for decades.

After production got under way in 1945, it was never completed and simply shelved. Only extracts have previously emerged, notably in the 1985 TV film A Painful Reminder. The story of the film, perhaps best known for the involvement of Alfred Hitchcock, was recently told in the documentary Night Will Fall, released in cinemas last September and screened on Channel 4 in January. Now, however, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, restored and completed to the film-makers’ original specifications, has gone on public release for the first time, with a two-week run at the BFI Southbank in London, and further screenings in May through the Picturehouse chain of cinemas.

Speaking after a special screening on 16 April, the restoration team, led by Toby Haggith, senior curator in film at the Imperial War Museum, outlined the process to finish the film, which was originally the brainchild of producer Sidney Bernstein (who went on to found Granada Television). Haggith explained that the film was commissioned by Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force with the intention of confronting German civilians and prisoners of war with indisputable evidence of the atrocities committed in their midst, and was compiled from footage shot by British, US and Russian camera crews that accompanied troops as they liberated hundreds of camps and subcamps in Germany, Austria and eastern Europe.

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Hitchcock “gave crucial advice on how the film should be shaped”, Haggith explained, but worked on it for only a month, in July 1945, while editors tried to make sense of hours of footage that were continually being sent to London from the front. “We believe he looked at rushes, and discussed them with editor Peter Tanner, as well as possibly having a hand in the writing of the first treatment.” The film begins at Bergen-Belsen, liberated on 15 April 1945, and moves east through Germany and Poland, culminating in short sequences filmed at Auschwitz and Majdanek.

The restoration team watched the original raw footage and discovered shots of bulldozers shovelling corpses into the burial pits that was too gruesome even for such a shocking film. “They clearly had to work fast, for reasons of sanitation.”

There remain conflicting opinions as to why the project had been shelved. After the screening, Rainer Schulze, a history professor at the University of Essex, said he theorised that the failure of earlier concentration camp films, such as the Billy Wilder-directed Death Mills, had failed to dent what he calls the “denial” and “amnesia” of the German population in the immediate postwar period.

Another issue that may have contributed to the original film not being completed are errors in the lyrical voiceover script, written by future cabinet minister Richard Crossman. Chief among these were the figure of 4 million deaths at Auschwitz (based on contemporary Soviet estimates, but later revised to 1.1m) and the failure to establish that Jews were the central target of Nazi persecution. Schulze says: “All sorts of things had become clearer by the end of 1945, as a result of the Nuremberg trials, that the film-makers hadn’t known in the summer – and so the whole humanitarian argument of the film could have been undermined.”

The Holocaust film that was too shocking to show Read more

The restoration team, however, chose to leave the script – recently recorded by actor Jasper Britton – exactly as written, to preserve the film’s authenticity as a historical document.

The film has been given an 18 certificate by the British Board of Film Classification, which cited its “graphic footage”, thereby restricting its ability to be screened in schools. The Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust education officer, Rachel Donnelly, thinks the certification is appropriate. “To show something like this in schools would be a huge challenge. Teachers have six lessons, on average, to teach the Holocaust, and if we want children to think of the victims as real people, with real lives – and more than piles of dead bodies, which is how the Nazis would have wanted it – this film is not where young people should be engaging with it for the first time. Undergraduate courses are the place the film should be, not a year-nine classroom with 13- and 14-year-olds.”

Even so, the content of the film is so gruesome that the team insisted that a panel discussion be held after every screening, to help with what Haggith describes as the “shock and trauma” it induces. With the film going on general release, the restorers have appended a short video introduction and epilogue that outline the issues involved.

Haggith is also prepared for the inevitable snipes and counter-claims that are a contemporary feature of any discussion of the Holocaust. “Deniers are already saying what we’ve done is wrong,” he says. “We were accused in Australia that the Imperial War Museum was doing this to deflect attention from Israeli foreign policy in Gaza. Like we had done this in two months. You can worry too much about deniers.”