- 4 months ago
The premiere of footage from an unfinished 1945 documentary made by British and American filmmakers (Alfred Hitchcock among them) who followed Allied armies into Nazi concentration camps to capture post-liberation images.
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00:01Major funding for Frontline is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
00:07Additional funding is provided by this station and other public television stations nationwide.
00:18Good evening. Tonight, a special edition of Frontline.
00:23On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the Allied victory in Europe,
00:27we want to take a moment to look back and to remember the awful legacy of Nazi Germany.
00:33There's a story behind tonight's film. It was made 40 years ago,
00:38but was only recently discovered in the archives of the Imperial War Museum in London.
00:44The film is a record of what the Allied forces found,
00:48photographed by army cameramen when they entered the Nazi death camps.
00:53For reasons that are not completely clear, it was never finished.
00:57The version found in the archives is mostly silent.
01:01The soundtracks are missing, and the final reel has been lost.
01:05However, a script to accompany the pictures was found,
01:09so we asked British actor Trevor Howard to read it.
01:12We decided to run the film uncut, unedited, as close as possible to what the producers intended 40 years ago.
01:21They made it as a document to serve our collective memory.
01:26And I must warn you, it is harrowing and painful to watch.
01:31But 11 million people died in those death camps.
01:35Six million were Jews. We should never forget.
02:04In March 1933, 17,264,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party.
02:15Twenty million, six hundred and eighty thousand others cast their vote for Democrats,
02:28Communists, Christians, Socialists, People's Party, et cetera, et cetera.
02:34Lack of unity among these parties, supposing the Nazis, proved fatal.
02:41The National Socialist Party was in power.
02:47They made many claims and many promises.
03:02They made many claims and many promises.
03:23The German people had embarked on that long, incredible journey that led seemingly out of chaos to unprecedented triumph.
03:34Promise after promise had been fulfilled.
03:46Austria, 1938.
03:48Czechoslovakia, 1938.
03:50Poland, 1939.
03:52Norway, Denmark and France in quick succession.
03:55Why?
03:56Why?
03:57Why?
03:58Why?
03:59Why?
04:00Why?
04:01A place in the sun at last.
04:07True, they had lost their trade unions and a lot of books had been burned, but it seemed a good sort of bargain.
04:27One got to like being told what to do, having one's views prescribed, especially if it meant a vista bright with the promise of grandeur and conquest.
04:40In the spring of 1945, the Allies advancing into the heart of Germany came to Bergen-Belsen.
05:05Neat and tidy orchards, well-stocked farms lined the wayside, and the British soldier did not fail to admire the place and its inhabitants, at least until he began to feel a smell.
05:34It came from a concentration camp, a waste ringed with barbed wire and overlooked by watchtowers.
05:46Coming in from the flowering countryside, in spite of the frightful smell, things didn't seem so bad at first.
05:52Children smiled through the barbed wire, and women laughed and waved their hands.
05:59But Belsen camp was vast, and inside was a different story.
06:09They had not eaten for six days, and every soldier's stock of food was called into use.
06:15Water, too, had been cut off, and so the water cart was the most important thing to arrive.
06:29Most of the people seemed to be listless beyond hope and astonishment.
06:37Hunger had probably affected them that way.
06:41We discovered that among this stench of disease and decay was something a bit worse than hunger.
06:51Moving vaguely on rickety skeleton legs, they were too ill to eat.
06:59How grateful they were for a kindly word or gesture.
07:04What misery to live amongst such unmentionable filth, with scarcely the strength to pick the lice which inevitably swarmed over them.
07:19They seemed accustomed to the smell and the horror.
07:23They had seen all there was to see.
07:26Huts were almost impossible to go near.
07:31They were full of tangled masses of people who had died slowly and painfully of starvation and disease,
07:40writhing in agony, helpless in puddles of excrement.
07:47It was difficult to imagine those orchards now,
07:52those rich fields where the stolid cattle cropped the juicy grass.
07:57For here, a few minutes away, inside the barbed wire,
08:03was nothing but filth and death.
08:11Dead prisoners hurled out and stacked in twisted heaps.
08:17Dead women like marble statues in the mire.
08:26This was what these inmates had to live among and die among.
08:47The dead which lay there were not numbered in hundreds, but in thousands.
08:58Not one or two thousands, but thirty thousands.
09:06Here is a pit where the inmates, in order to earn food,
09:12had to drag the bodies of their comrades.
09:16But they were too weak to keep up with the rate at which they were dying.
09:21So, the pit remains only half filled.
09:26The SS guards in charge of the camp were captured and lined up for examination.
09:41Their papers were gone through to confirm their status, their authority,
09:47each with his death's head badge, each justified by German law.
09:54They were unashamed, well-fed, well-dressed and cheerful.
10:01There were women also on guard in Belson.
10:06Volunteers who came of their own free will to do their bit.
10:11Not sickly pale with hollow faces and hungry eyes,
10:16but well-fed and well-kept with a strutting arrogance.
10:28The commandant of the camp, Josef Kramer, was removed for trial as a war criminal
10:35by an allied military court.
10:48There was an urgent need to get rid of as many bodies as possible, as quickly as possible.
10:54So all the SS were set to work.
11:03Five hundred Hungarian troops captured with the SS were started on a grave-digging operation.
11:11The SS themselves were made to do the unpleasant job they had forced the inmates to do.
11:24This, after all, was nothing to these men.
11:28They, the master race, had been taught to be hard.
11:35They could kill in cold blood, and it seemed to the British soldier, fit and proper,
11:40that the killers should bury the nameless, hopeless creatures they had starved to death.
11:55The faces of the bystanders showed just a little of the hate that Germany has inspired,
12:01and some of the anguish, too.
12:25I wanted to leave the
12:35they were comfortable in the world.
12:37But there's a learning process,
12:38it was great.
12:39It was a little different for the Romans,
12:40to the first time.
12:42The human being, the other people of carriers,
12:44they had a big question.
12:46The other people who've worked with,
12:48and the other people who've worked with,
12:50they've worked with their friends,
12:52and a bit of my family.
15:58And an orgy of washing ensued.
16:12A mobile bath unit was set up and provided hot water for baths.
16:20Inmates thought there was a snag at first, expected to be beaten for going near it, probably.
16:26But when they learned that the dream was hot water.
16:34And these are the people, the Nazis said, delighted in being dirty.
16:40And these are the people, the Nazis said, delighted in being dirty.
16:50These are the people, the Nazis said, delighted in being dirty.
17:44But the job of clearing up Belson was a big one.
17:48The Burgermeisters and civil officials of the neighborhood,
18:17were brought to witness the scenes that had been caused as part of the Nazi scheme of things.
18:24This is not what they expected.
18:27It had been happening for years, but they shrugged their shoulders and beat their brows and tried to say it had been none of their business.
18:56But they were mostly silent.
18:58But they were mostly silent.
19:00much of the community.
19:01So those who moved in a virtualosseous Lesnar had been watched as they object and now sheведated myself inaros of on theirνη
19:09events.
19:09I was principio to conclude now.
19:10And I would argue the truth of why the Nazi suggested would be really sampai.
19:12And Pennreich spoke in개� world.
19:15So that this was a very productive experience.
19:17The SS men are not so spick and span now.
19:41Seven days of being shouted and cursed at and handling corpses by the hundred are beginning
19:49to tell.
20:11After seven dreadful days, the funerals still go on.
20:31There seems to be no end.
20:43I'm Dr. Fritz Klein, been a doctor for a hundred and a half years in concentration
20:52lagern.
20:53I'm born on the 24th of 1988, so 58 years old.
21:00I'm a German from Romania.
21:04I speak today on the 24th of April 1945.
21:10They were given an address by a British officer through a loudspeaker.
21:16They, who they are the brothers and brothers of the German youth, see in their eyes some of
21:25the sons and daughters, who have a small part of the direct responsibility for these
21:33crimes.
21:35A small part only, but difficult to carry out, as it is the human soul possible.
21:44But who takes the real responsibility?
21:48They, who allowed you to carry out this hell of a crazy madness.
21:57They, who could not do enough enough for these trials to carry out.
22:05They, who had heard from these situations, had so many...
22:11So many.
22:41One might ask why all the inmates surviving
23:06were not removed out of the camp altogether to a large town, for example.
23:10Where there would be feeding and housing facilities?
23:15The answer is simply the dread word, typhus.
23:20A mobile bacteriological unit and all medical aid possible,
23:25together with 90 medical students from London hospitals,
23:28were rushed to the spot to deal with it.
23:31Lack of soap and water brought lice to the inmates.
23:37And lice carry typhus.
23:40To get rid of typhus, one must first get rid of lice.
24:03So contaminated patients were removed from their huts
24:07and put through a laundry process.
24:10D.D.T. was dusted over them, and they were washed clean,
24:37wrapped in blankets and removed in clean ambulances
24:42by teams working in relays,
24:44and a miracle of relief work.
25:07Two miles away from the camp was found a large SS Panzer training school and hospital,
25:26well-stocked with medical supplies.
25:30Strange that these should not have been used by the Germans for the inmates.
25:33Scores still died every day.
25:42They were too far gone, many of them, to digest any food,
25:46and there was a desperate shortage of nursing staff.
25:50Still, one could be thankful that they were not simply being left to rot away with neglect.
25:55There were children, too, in Belsen camp,
26:02though what crime they had committed was difficult to imagine.
26:07Most of them had been saved by the women inmates
26:10who gave up what little food they could get to the children.
26:13Meals for these children had always been few and far between.
26:22So they ate what food we gave them with infinite care.
26:28Nothing could be more dreadful now
26:31than to lose a piece of potato or a drop of soup.
26:35Clothes was another urgent problem,
26:45so an outfitting department was set up
26:49and clothes gathered from shops in the surrounding towns.
26:52They're soon being tried on and gossiped over, as women love to do.
26:57There was something symbolic about new clothes.
27:13New clothes meant renewed hope.
27:20They donned them with pride.
27:27Now he can look forward to growing up to useful manhood.
27:41There were more than 200 children under 12 years old
27:45found still alive in Belsen camp.
27:49To these children, clean, dry clothes and kind words from a stranger
27:55were strange, undreamed-of, mysterious things.
28:01Some had been born behind the barbed wire.
28:05In what circumstances one dare not try to imagine?
28:09Where are their parents?
28:28Here, perhaps.
28:29Here, perhaps.
28:29Or here.
28:47Here.
28:55Here.
28:56or down here in this pit.
29:15Today is the 24th of April, 1945.
29:18My name is Gunnar Ellingworth, and I live at Cheshire.
29:21I'm a president in Beltson Camp to engage you to over the SS men.
29:24The things in this camp are beyond describing.
29:28When you actually see them for yourself, you know what you're fighting for here.
29:32Pictured in the paper, cannot describe it at all.
29:36The things they have committed, well, nobody would think they were human at all.
29:42We actually know now what has been going on in these camps.
29:47I know personally what I am fighting for.
29:52I am the Reverend T.J. Stledge.
29:55Attached, as Padre, to the formation controlling this camp.
29:59My home is at Fishguard.
30:01My parish was at Holy Trinity Church, Everestworth.
30:05I've been here eight days,
30:07and never in my life have I seen such damnable ghastliness.
30:12This morning we buried over 5,000 bodies.
30:14We don't know who they are.
30:16Behind me you can see a pit, which will contain another 5,000.
30:20There are two others like it in preparation.
30:24All these deaths have been caused by systematic starvation and typhus and disease,
30:29which have been spread because of the treatment meted out to these poor people
30:34by their SS guards and their SS chief.
30:37We shall never know who they were or from what homes they were torn.
30:52Whether they were Catholics, Lutherans, or Jews,
30:55we only know they were born, they suffered, and died in agony in Belsen Camp.
31:04Amen.
31:05So take a look.
31:06Amen.
31:07Amen.
31:07Amen.
31:38And so they lie, Jews, Lutherans and Catholics, indistinguishable, cheek to cheek, in a common grave.
31:56The living have been taken to a cleaner place.
32:08The typhus-infected huts are set afire.
32:14Soon the fire will die, the smoke and ashes will drift away, and grass will cover the place.
33:13The barbed wire goes down.
33:18The striped livery goes with it.
33:21The barbed wire goes down.
33:24. Stay flowers.
33:30Please.
33:30Do not imagine this was the only black spot
33:51that was uncovered in Germany.
33:55There were over 300 others.
34:00No German can say he did not know about them.
34:11The whole world had heard of a Dachau,
34:14for it was publicized by the Nazis as a model camp
34:18ever since its inception way back in 1933.
34:26On the 28th of February of that year,
34:29the presidential emergency decree suspended the basic civil rights
34:34of the German people for an indeterminate period
34:38and so eliminated legal safeguards against arbitrary imprisonment.
34:44Here were 32,000 men of every European nationality,
35:05including 5,660 Germans.
35:08From the outside, one might, at a casual glance,
35:14have seen nothing remarkable or horrifying,
35:16but Dachau was crammed with three or four times
35:20the number it was designed for.
35:23This is the one.
35:27So,
35:28that was the one.
35:30So,
35:31they were not only one thousand years ago.
35:31That's one.
35:32So,
35:32that's the one.
35:33So,
35:33that's the one.
35:34So,
35:34that's the one.
37:05Men became weak.
37:10Men fell sick until they died where they lay on the floor.
37:16In Hut 30 alone, there is recorded, for example, 72 deaths within 24 hours.
38:04Every day the dead were taken from the huts.
38:13Here, as at Belson, there were many who were too weak to be saved, too sick to eat.
38:20Typhus was taking its toll, and truckloads of wretchedness had to be somehow dealt with in the already overflowing hospitals.
38:32There was only a few minutes.
38:33There was a couple of days ago, there were many who were too late to go, and the other one was too late to go, and the other one was too late to go.
38:37Dachau had its own brothel for the use of guards and favoured prisoners.
39:07As the women died, they were replaced by a fresh contingent from the women's camp at Ravensbrück.
39:28This was not used as a bathhouse, but as a death chamber.
39:37Batches of prisoners were marched in here to die.
39:44Batches of prisoners
39:51When the chamber was full, the doors were shut and sealed.
40:02A man at the controls let in the poison gas,
40:04and another batch of helpless victims screamed their lives out beyond the grill.
40:11The gas chamber was conveniently placed next to the mortuary.
40:27And next to that was the crematorium.
40:33These great ovens were constructed exclusively for the burning of large numbers of corpses.
40:42In the last three months, official records show that 10,615 people were disposed of here.
40:52Their clothes were turned over to the Deutsche Textil und Bekleidungswerke GmbH,
40:58a private corporation whose stockholders were SS officials,
41:03which reclaimed and repaired the garments with the use of unpaid prison labour,
41:09and then resold them to the camp clothing depot for the use of new prisoners.
41:15The prisoners arrived often in railway trucks,
41:35but there had been no hurry to unload this one.
41:39They went away, leaving the prisoners to die of hunger and cold and typhus.
41:46We found them like this, frozen stiff in the snow alongside a public road.
41:53By some miracle, 17 men were still alive.
41:59All the rest, about 3,000, were dead.
42:04Germans knew about Dachau, but did not care.
42:17In Buchenwald, there were about 80,000 of whom 34,000 were employed outside the camp,
42:25in an armaments factory.
42:28During the first week of April, 25,000 were removed by the Germans to other camps
42:40because of the approach of the Allied forces.
42:43When the camp was liberated on April 13th, 20,000 inmates remained.
42:50African Negroes, Albanians, Austrians, Belgians, Brazilians, Bulgarians, Canadians,
42:59Chinese, Croats, Czechs, Danes, French, Germans, British, Greeks, Dutch, Italians,
43:07Yugoslavs, Latvians, Letts, Norwegians, Mexicans, Poles, Romanians, Spaniards, Swiss,
43:15Americans, and Russians.
43:1855,000 of them died because of this place.
43:22People were tattooed across the belly with slave numbers and forced to work on starvation diet.
43:30People were coldly and systematically tortured.
43:35Here, Shoker, the camp commandant said,
43:43I want at least 600 Jewish deaths reported in the camp office every day.
43:56Thugs were appointed as overseers or block leaders.
44:00There was no efficient distribution of food.
44:20One prisoner collected the rations for 10 or 15 men.
44:24Hunger and hopelessness turned some of them into beasts.
44:31Sometimes a prisoner carrying rations back to the hut was waylaid and robbed by other prisoners.
44:37Sometimes he ate the best part of the food himself.
44:42Sometimes he sold it.
44:49Corruption was fostered for it gave another excuse for killing.
44:54All this seemed so remote from humanity, so far beyond the behaviour of man.
45:23British members of parliament came and saw and were sick at heart.
45:36It had to be seen to be believed.
45:39German citizens were brought in from Weimar.
45:52They had to see too.
45:56To see what they had been fighting for.
45:59And we had been fighting against.
46:07They came cheerfully, like sightseers, to a chamber of horrors.
46:11For here indeed were some real horrors.
46:15If a prisoner had a curiously tattooed skin, it was taken from him.
46:25We can only hope he was dead when it was done.
46:28The skin was tanned and made into lampshades, etc.
46:34These shrunken heads belonged to two Polish prisoners who had escaped and been recaptured.
46:51Some of the visitors did not care for the site and were assisted by ex-prisoners.
47:06Ebensee is a holiday resort in the mountains.
47:21The air is clean and pure.
47:24It cures sickness and there is a sweetness about the place.
47:28A gentle peace.
47:31In this place, the Luftwaffe, or SS Panzer officer, or leave, relaxes, eats well, breathes deeply, finds romance.
47:46Everything is charming and picturesque.
48:07But the concentration camp had become an integral part of the German economic system.
48:15So it was here too.
48:22They were able to see the mountains, but what use are mountains without food?
48:30Prisoners of Dachau and Buchenwald dreaded being sent here.
48:36To them, this place did not mean recuperation.
48:40Only starvation, tuberculosis through slavery in an underground factory.
48:46And finally, left to cough one's life out, unaided and crowded in the filth and stench of a hut.
48:55Unfit for dogs, but for some reason called a hospital.
49:02The daily collection of corpses was disposed of through this chimney.
49:23The daily collection of corpses was disposed of through this chimney.
49:38Brothausen.
49:39First used in 1938, this camp was the center of a group of subsidiary camps.
49:5350,000 people had died here since the beginning of the year.
50:00Here, the gas chamber held 200 at a time, and the crematorium dealt with 300 per day, every day.
50:14Ludwig Schlust.
50:24In the north of Germany, it was the same story.
50:28The few who remained alive were staggering on the verge of death.
50:38They were the survivors, and these were the rest.
50:42Hurriedly murdered, lest they be set free to live a normal life.
50:47The authorities in the camps took special measures to make sure that a man would neither live normally nor die normally.
51:15Neither should he sleep normally.
51:22He was surrounded by barbed wire, and he had to sleep on barbed wire.
51:30Ordruff.
51:31Here was carnage and desolation.
51:55The prisoners had been dragged from the sacks of straw in the hovels called hospitals, shot and hastily disposed of by the first means to hand.
52:18There must have been some feeling of guilt, or presumably there would not have been an attempt to destroy the evidence.
52:25In the outskirts of Leipzig.
52:40In the outskirts of Leipzig, an effort was made to prevent 300 forced workers in a factory from being set free by advancing Allied troops.
52:52300 were locked in a mess hut and burned.
52:57This is where it stood.
53:02Some of the desperate, screaming prisoners broke out.
53:07Flamethrowers and machine guns were waiting to receive them.
53:11This was a woman.
53:23Some almost reached the barbed wire.
53:30Some got there and stayed there, for it was electrified.
53:41This was a Polish engineer.
54:10Gardelegen.
54:19American troops advancing did not know that in this barn the Germans had locked 1,800 prisoners and set burning straw alight to suffocate them.
54:31In the morning before retreating they had poured petrol on the bodies in an attempt to burn what remained.
54:46It still smoldered when the American troops arrived.
54:59This man was shot because he gasped for air, trying to escape while the rest of him burned in the barn.
55:18Auschwitz.
55:43The most up to date institution was better equipped for killing.
55:57The transports of prisoners from all over occupied Europe were sent for extermination in one of the special Wernigstunnschlager.
56:06Here, four million people were murdered.
56:18As many men, women and children as you could pack into a great city.
56:25As many men were injured to the court.
56:26The two women were literally hung in the sky.
56:28This man was born from the French fish.
56:30Here came to the Japanese man.
56:32The 14 men were buried.
56:33The 14 men were buried in the social history.
56:34The 15 men were buried.
56:35The 15 men and the 13 men were buried in the moment,
56:36The 15 men were buried in the middle of the 18 men.
56:37The 15 men were buried in the 18 men of the 18 men.
57:08The dead have been buried.
57:12It remains for us to care for these, the living.
57:18It remains for us to hope that Germans may help to mend what they have broken and cleanse what they have befouled.
57:27Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims.
57:35But this was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933.
57:43Twelve years?
57:45No.
57:46In terms of barbarity and brutality, they had traveled backwards for 12,000 years.
57:51Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall.
58:00But by God's grace, we who live will learn.
58:19Major funding for Frontline
58:40was provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
58:44Additional funding was provided by this station
58:46and other public television stations nationwide.
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