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German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014)
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, based on footage shot by the Allied forces in 1945.
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock · Cut by Stewart McAllister · 60 min
How it was made
- Despite sometimes being credited as the film's director, the Imperial War Museum describes Hitchcock as its treatment advisor: his month of involvement began only after the footage had already been shot, and he was not involved in cutting the rough assembly.
- Hitchcock's main advice to the editors was to avoid tricky editing and favour long shots and panning, reasoning this was necessary because many people would refuse to believe the footage and would accuse the Allies of faking it.
- He recommended showing German villagers being brought to visit the camps, and suggested including shots at Auschwitz of the piles of victims' belongings, wedding rings, spectacles and toothbrushes; the finished footage included one shot of a mound of spectacles with narration noting roughly one victim in ten wore glasses.
- The film drew on fourteen filmed locations, ten concentration camps and four atrocity sites, splicing together silent footage shot by combat cameramen with sound footage recorded separately by newsreel crews.
- After a five-reel rough cut was screened in September 1945, the project was shelved amid postwar shortages, an editing-machine shortage, and a change in occupation policy, and was not properly reconstructed and shown until Memory of the Camps in 1984.
Behind the scenes
Elsewhere
More by Alfred Hitchcock
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