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Combat cameramen serving with the Allied forces fought their way across occupied Europe in the Second World War, filming ­liberation from the Nazis. They captured the joy of freed people welcoming British Tommies, but also the wanton death and destruction of total warfare.

Often at risk from enemy fire and armed with nothing more lethal than a cine camera, they sent the reality of war back home on film.

But nothing on the battlefield could prepare them for the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps. Combat-seasoned sergeants gazed in mute disbelief at scenes of mass murder, torture and depravity.

Still, they kept the cameras rolling, to record the greatest act of man’s inhumanity to man (and woman, and child), for a documentary that would warn future generations what happens when a nation abandons belief in the sanctity of life.

Directed by the future Granada TV chief Sidney Bernstein, with Alfred Hitchcock on board as an adviser and Labour politician – and psychological warfare expert – Richard Crossman writing the script, it was to be entitled German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

It closes with these words. “Unless the world learns the lessons these picture teach, night will fall, and by the grace of God we who live will learn.”

But night did fall, on the film itself. Amid post-war political intrigue, the project was shelved. The harrowing images of SS guards dragging emaciated corpses to mass graves, of a weeping woman kneeling and kissing the hand of her British liberator, of German civilians confronted with the vile acts of inhumanity carried out in their midst, were put into storage in 1945.

Almost 70 years later, the British Film Institute, working with the Imperial War Museum and top flight director Andre Singer, has brought them back to life in a 75-minute documentary about the filming, inevitably titled Night Will Fall.

This powerful film is now in cinemas around the country. I watched a preview DVD with alternating horror and distress, the tears never far away.

If that is what it is like on film, what must it have been like for the combat cameramen?

Too painful to contemplate, but they were just ordinary soldiers doing their duty – Sergeant Mike Lewis, and Sergeant William Lawrie, both army cameramen.

Sergeant Lewis remembers driving into Belsen: “We saw a sight that shook us as nothing even in the sights of war had ever, ever, ever shown us before. It was painful to look at, pain that this could happen to people.

“There were hundreds of bodies piled up. There was a stench of death everywhere. There were pits containing bodies of people as big as lawn tennis courts – babies, youths, girls, men, women, old and young, how deep we didn’t know.”

Sergeant Lawrie recalls haltingly: “There were half-dead people walking about, glazed eyes and absolutely dead. There was the appalling smell, the whole atmosphere of depression, like the end had come.

“You lost contact with reality... they were dummies, they were dolls. I don’t know whether we ourselves withdrew into another space time existence but you could never associate what you were seeing with your own life. This was something completely separate. It’s another world. If you had become too involved I think you would probably have gone mad.”

Night Will Fall also brings us the ­testimony of Captain Alexander Vorontsov, a cameraman with the Red Army sweeping into Poland when Maidanek camp was discovered. “We shot the guards dead on the spot,” he reports tersely.

Here too, are the extraordinary survivors of the Nazi killing industry, including Branko Lustig who made it out of Bergen-Belsen and went on to become a producer of Schindler’s List. And there’s Menachem Rosensaft, born in Belsen in 1948 when it became a displaced persons camp. He’s younger than me. All this happened in my lifetime.

And with the horrors of present-day Syria, Iraq, Libya and Central Africa there has never been a more appropriate time to be reminded of what happens when night falls on humanity.

(Image: Hulton Archive)

This unique film, narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, opens with British troops moving into northern Germany in April 1945. When they get to Bergen-Belsen the SS are still there. The barbaric commandant Joseph Kramer is still in his office.

They become prisoners of war, while inmate Mania Salinger runs screaming to the barbed wire: “The Germans are going! The British are here!” She recalls: “I will never forget it. They said, ‘help is on the way, we are British soldiers.’ We were just crazy.” And that’s where the unknown weeping woman kisses the hand of the unknown soldier who has given her life back to her.

A fleeting, poignant, unforgettable moment, but it’s the curtain-raiser to mind-blowing scenes of corpses piled high on the ground, thrown into bulldozed mass graves, of gaunt, terminally-starved faces.

Of human hair “harvested” for the Nazi war effort. Of piles of spectacles, shoes, clothes, suitcases, teeth stored in warehouses, gruesome ­paraphernalia of an extermination industry.

Hitchcock called for long sweeping shots, so there could be no accusations of fabrication.

He dreamed up a way of confronting the Germans with their collective guilt and the wider world with the criminal proximity of ­civilians who turn a blind eye to what is going on in their midst. He used large-scale maps to show audiences how close ordinary Germans had lived to the camps. One mile, five miles, 20 miles. And you knew nothing?

It isn’t all death and destruction. There is footage of women camp survivors, rummaging through clothes liberated from German stores and trying them on amid gossip with fellow ex-inmates. With food and medical care, they often got better within weeks. Women recovered their sense of humanity faster. A hairdo and new clothes were part of the therapy.

But the Bernstein-Hitchcock film was not allowed to see the light of day. A secret official Whitehall minute from the time makes Britain’s position clear: “Policy at the moment is entirely in the direction of encouraging, stimulating and interesting the Germans out of their apathy, and there are people around the C-in-C [Commander in Chief] who will say ‘no atrocity film’.”

The Americans produced a shorter, more overtly propagandist film, Death Mills, to show in their Zone of ­Occupation.

It had its “premiere” in Wurzburg to an audience of 500 Germans, all but 75 of whom left before the end, sickened and ashamed of what had been done in their name. But though the 100 feet of British film never made it to the screen, some was used as evidence in the Nuremberg war crimes trials. The Butcher of Belsen, Joseph Kramer, was sentenced to death.

General Dwight Eisenhower, overall Allied commander, put it succinctly after visiting Belsen. American soldiers ­sometimes asked what they were fighting for, so, he said “at least they now know what we are fighting against”.

And that’s what Night Will Fall does also. It fights against forgetting this Holocaust happened in our lifetime, and if we fail to heed the message behind those haunting pictures, it will fall again, and again, and again.