- Towards end of WWII, UK Ministry of Information commissioned a Holocaust documentary
- Hitchcock was brought on board as “treatment advisor” and helped shape its aesthetic
- But rapidly changing political priorities meant the uncompleted film was shelved
- Unseen rough cut was resurrected after four decades and widely broadcast
- Some footage also found its way into other, similar war documentaries
- Original documentary was finally completed nearly 70 years later
Note: this is part of an ongoing series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles; any dead links are to those not yet published. Subscribe to the email list to be notified when new ones appear.
The Master of Suspense made or contributed to many anti-fascist films and propaganda campaigns before, during and after WWII, including classics such as The 39 Steps, Secret Agent, The Lady Vanishes, Foreign Correspondent, Saboteur, Lifeboat, Bon Voyage and Aventure Malgache, and Notorious.
Contents
- Death Mills (1946)
- Memory of the Camps (1984)
- A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind (1985)
- German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014)
- Night Will Fall (2014)
- Night and Fog (1956)
- Related articles
Death Mills (1946)
When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army cameramen, revealing for the first time the horror of what had happened. Using British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock to make a film that would provide evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US governments, the film was shelved. In this compelling documentary by André Singer (executive producer, The Act of Killing), the full story of the filming of the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project, which has now been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums, can finally be told. – UK BFI DVD (2016)
How Death Mills Came to US Audiences – Criss Austin
Although the project that came to be labelled as file number F3080 wasn’t completed until years later, some of its footage was extracted for Death Mills aka Die Todesmühlen (21min), a dual-language short overseen and edited by Billy Wilder, and produced by the US Office of Military Government. Shown to audiences in both countries to educate them on the evils committed, it can be viewed at the US National Archives and Holocaust Memorial Museum. It’s also been included with copies of Night Will Fall and these related releases:
- The Stranger (1946) – US: Kino BD and DVD
- UK: Odeon BD/DVD
- Who Shall Live and Who Shall Die (1982) – US: Kino DVD
- A Film Unfinished (2010) – US: Oscilloscope DVD
Bootleg: Italy (DNA), cropped to faux-widescreen.
Todesmühlen in Wien – Michaela Anderle
In 2025, The Film, an hour-long play on the making of the finished documentary, was broadcast on BBC Radio 4.
Memory of the Camps (1984)
US PBS DVD
The Fate of F3080 – Elizabeth Sussex, Sight and Sound
In 1984, the unfinished film, effectively a workprint, was unearthed from the archives and though only five of its planned six reels could be located at the time, actor Trevor Howard was recruited to record narration for them from its original script. Now titled Memory of the Camps (58min), this was the de facto version screened and broadcast worldwide for three decades until the full restoration. The fascinating and often deeply moving story of the film and its reception is related on PBS’s minisite (article).
Hitchcock, the Holocaust, and the Long Take: Memory of the Camps – Steven Jacobs
A Painful Reminder: Evidence for All Mankind (1985)
Further footage from the project was next seen in this similar, 64-minute, UK documentary with new narration and interviews including Bernstein for which he, Hitch and the rest of the original production team received acknowledgement in the credits. It’s never seen home video release but has been broadcast on international TV and uploaded to YouTube (part two).
German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2014)
Original edition’s preliminary artwork
Guardian, Independent, NY Times/interview
On 29 September 1945, the incomplete rough-cut of a disturbing yet compelling documentary revealing the horrors of the German concentration camps was screened at the Ministry of Information in London. For five months Sidney Bernstein had led a small team, including Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman and Alfred Hitchcock, to complete the film from hours of footage. But this ambitious Allied project to create a feature-length visual report that would damn the Nazi regime and shame the German people into accepting the Allied occupation had missed its moment and was eventually shelved, unfinished. Even in its incomplete form, however, the film proved immensely powerful, generating a shocked silence among audiences. Now completed to its intended six reels, this faithfully restored and definitive version, produced by Imperial War Museums (IWM) and with a newly recorded narration by Jasper Britton, has been rightly compared to Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956). – BFI BD/DVD
- UK: BFI BD/2-DVD German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (2017, reissued/alt 2020)
One important contribution Hitchcock made in his role as “treatment advisor” was to suggest using unedited footage where possible to deflect accusations of fakery, reflecting his burgeoning interest in long takes that would soon manifest itself in Rope and Under Capricorn. No expense or attention to detail has been spared on the BFI’s comprehensive dual-format set. Packaged in a slipcase, it contains an 80-page book, almost 2½ hours of extras including a BFI Q&A and an audio commentary by Toby Haggith and Patrick Russell, senior curators at the Imperial War Museum and BFI National Archive respectively. After quickly selling out its initial run, it was reissued in a keep case with the book trimmed in half to a still-substantial 40-pages. The two versions are sometimes listed interchangeably so check carefully which one you’re buying.
- The Film (2025) – BBC Radio 4
- Press release/resources – IWM
- The importance of GCCFS/Restoring and Completing/70th Anniversary…/more – Toby Haggith
- Holocaust and the Moving Image in Film and TV Since 1933 (2005) ed. Haggith, Joanna Newman
- Seeing and Believing: Sid Bernstein’s German Atrocities Film – Florence Jacobowitz
- Disembodied Horror: The Crisis of the Flesh and Factual Survey – Inez de Coo
Night Will Fall (2014)
★★★★★ – Guardian, Times, Independent; Allan Fish
“Unforgettable.” – Matthew Gilbert, Boston Globe
“Dark, deep, disturbing, shocking, brilliant.” – Stephen Fry
“A riveting, devastating, heartbreaking and deeply important film.” – Gary Goldstein, LA Times
Night Will Fall is the story of the incredible efforts made by British cameramen to film and document the unbelievable atrocities the Allies encountered during the Liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945 at the end of World War II. The Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein collaborated with Alfred Hitchcock to make a documentary that was to provide undeniable proof that these horrifying crimes actually happened. For a number of reasons that André Singer’s powerful film explores, the film was ultimately shelved and languished in British archives for years until the Imperial War Museum completed the film in 2014. In this intimate and emotional film we meet the cameramen and the survivors who participated in the original documentary and tell their unforgettable stories here for the first time. – US DVD
There were limited streaming options for viewing André Singer’s essential companion piece in HD but while preferable for the film itself, far more useful are the extras-heavy DVDs. The BFI comes with a whole 2½ hours of them, including both versions of Death Mills and a 32-page booklet; and Warner’s disc has 70 minutes’ worth of the BFI extras while the Dutch DVD specs are unconfirmed.
Night Will Fall: The Story of File Number F3080 – David Parkinson
Hitch | HBO | C4: trailer, full film | preview | Mark Kermode’s review, YT | André Singer interview (at 12min) | LL Show | Screening talks: 2014; 2015, speech, news; 2016; 2021
Night and Fog (1956)
UK Optimum DVD artwork
Stanké, Cohen, Ruesta | discussion
“For a few hours, Nuit et brouillard wipes out the memory of all other films. It absolutely must be seen” – François Truffaut
“Should not be confined to specialist distribution: the evidence it bears should be brought to the public of the world.” – Louis Marcorellas, Sight and Sound
Alain Resnais’ astounding documentary on the Holocaust, commissioned by the French Committee for the History of the Second World War, remains one of the most respected ever made. The film takes its title from Hitler’s decree that anyone who “endangered Germany’s security” was to “vanish without trace (in the) night and fog” of the Third Reich. A harrowing look at concentration camps and the Holocaust, it carefully juxtaposes documentary footage, shot in black and white by the Allied troops who liberate, the camps with contemporary colour footage of a tour of the ruins of Auschwitz in the 1950s. The images that Resnais presents are so haunting that any attempt to describe them in words is almost futile.
How does one comment on footage chronicling the German Army executing the ‘logic’ of the ‘Final Solution’? Primo Levi wrote in his acclaimed book, If This is a Man, “It happened, therefore it can happen again” and the poetic refrain of the narrator of Night and Fog – “Who is responsible?” – forces us to confront the Holocaust as a continuing potentiality. A measure of the impact of this outstanding, heart wrenching and thought-provoking film came in May 1990 when, following a wave of attacks on Jewish cemeteries in France, all five national channels simultaneously postponed their schedules to transmit Night and Fog. – UK Nouveaux DVD (2006)
Preserved transfer
- US: Polygram/Warner Short Cinema Journal 1:3 DVD (1998, reissued 2000)
- UK: Nouveaux DVD (2006)
- Optimum DVD (2011)
- Italy: RHV DVD (2009)
- France: Arte DVD (2003)
- Spain: Filmax DVD (2008)
Iconic American directors George Stevens and John Ford shot much war footage in Europe including the liberation of the camps, resulting in 1945’s Nazi Concentration Camps and The Nazi Plan, both presented as evidence at the Nuremberg Trials. Conversely, Resnais’ universally acclaimed 33-minute short film was made 10 years after the fact. All the latter’s releases have varying extras, domestic subtitles and some optional dubs for its original French-language audio. Beware the first US DVD with its especially inferior transfer, only an English dub and, bizarrely, forced English subs; but it does have a half-length commentary by film historian David Shepard and comes with six unrelated shorts.
Restored transfer
- US: Criterion BD and DVD (2016) essay/vids
- Italy: CG BD and DVD (2024)
- Germany: Alive BD and DVD (2017/2015) trailer
- Spain: A Contracorriente BD and DVD (2016)
Later releases benefit from a 2015 4k restoration which, while an overall improvement, introduces an unnatural green tint to the colour footage. It’s fairly slight on the US transfer but much more pronounced on the German, Italian and Spanish which are additionally compromised with DNR. Comparative screenshots at Caps-a-holic and here:
US Polygram/Warner DVD, Criterion 03 DVD | Criterion BD
- Prisoners: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
- Nazis: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
- Hitler: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
- Auschwitz: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
- Greenhouses: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
- Vent: DVD1, DVD2 | BD
Related articles
This is part of a unique, in-depth series of 150-odd Hitchcock articles.
Hello, Brent… What do you think of the new StudioCanal release, Hitchcock: The Beginning? Do you intend to update the collector’s guide? Are those versions definitive? Is Blackmail aspect ratio problem fixed?
Happy New Year!
Also FYI from Wikipedia:
Adaptations of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey:
Later in 1945, the 22-minute short film Death Mills was produced by Billy Wilder for United States government authorities from some of the footage assembled for the 1945 documentary [GCCFS]. A German-language version of Death Mills, directed by Hanus Burger, was shown to German audiences in the United States occupation zone in January 1946.
The five completed reels of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (out of a planned six) were released in 1984 as Memory of the Camps, which was televised in the United States the following year.