page_title: German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
section_title: Production history
hierarchical_section_title: German Concentration Camps Factual Survey / Production history
caption_attribution_description: English: Studio publicity photo of Alfred Hitchcock.
context_page_description: 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.
  The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information, with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a "treatment advisor". The script was written by Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was production supervisor.
  The project was abandoned in September 1945, and the film was left unfinished for nearly seventy years. The film's restoration was completed by film scholars at the Imperial War Museum. The finished film had its world premiere early in 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival, and was shown in a limited number of venues in 2015. It was released in North America in 2017.
  The British government shelved the film without showing it to the public, and questions have been raised about the extent to which political considerations, such as British concern about Zionism or changes in German occupation policy, may have played in the film being withheld.
context_section_description: Sidney Bernstein, a cinema entrepreneur, had been an advisor to the Ministry of Information since 1940, and  from 1942 onwards had been in charge of supply of British films to cinemas in areas freed from Axis control. Early in 1945, he began to make inquiries about the availability of Soviet films showing scenes of German atrocities.
  Bernstein visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 22 April 1945, a week after it was liberated by British forces. What he saw there made him determined to make the film to show to German audiences. Production of the film was ordered by the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) which was a unit of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The PWD was responsible for the political activities in Germany of the British Ministry of Information and its U.S. counterpart, the Office of War Information. Bernstein began to assembly his film production team in April 1945.  He and the U.S. Information Control Division were the driving forces behind the film in its early stages.
  
  By the time Bernstein had visited Belsen, cameramen from the British Army Film and Photographic Unit had already been filming the early days of Belsen's liberation, including the capture of its commandant, Josef Kramer. Their films were recorded without sound. Recognizing the need to make the films as authentic as possible, he asked a newsreel cameraman from British Movietone News, who had sound equipment, to film interviews with British officials and members of the German SS. Among the German personnel interviewed by the newsreel cameramen were Fritz Klein, later executed for atrocities at Belsen. Klein was interviewed in front of a pile of bodies that included some of his victims.
  The film eventually utilized both silent footage from combat cameramen in the armed services and sound footage from newsreel cameramen. Fourteen locations were covered by the film, including ten concentration camps and four locations where atrocities had taken place. Among the camps where footage was shot was Belsen, Dachau, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and Majdanek.
  Bernstein's team included film editors Stewart McAllister, Peter Tanner, and Marcel Cohen, in addition to Crossman, Wills, and Bernstein's friend Alfred Hitchcock. Though Bernstein has described Hitchcock as the film's director, the Imperial War Museum describes Hitchcock as the film's "treatment advisor," noting that his one-month participation did not begin until after the footage was already shot and he was not involved in the rough cut of the film. Tanner also described Hitchcock as an advisor on the film and not as its director.
  
  Among the guidance Hitchcock provided was to recommend that the film avoid tricky editing to enhance its credibility, and to use wherever possible long shots and panning. He also recommended that German villagers be shown visiting the camps, and suggested showing scenes at Auschwitz showing piles of hair, wedding rings, spectacles and toothbrushes. Hitchcock told the filmmakers that these steps were necessary because many people would not believe the film and would accuse the Allies of faking the film.
  After production commenced, film was continually flowing in from the front, as concentration camps were liberated. Ultimately the film incorporated the work of British, American and Soviet camera crews. Their cameras documented piles of dead, as well as starved survivors and burned remains in the ovens of the crematoria, and incorporated Hitchcock's suggestion by showing piles of victims' belongings, teeth, and bags of hair at the Majdanek camp. An immense pile of spectacles was accompanied by narration noting that perhaps one victim in ten wore spectacles.
  No mention of the Holocaust was made in the production of the film, which might be attributed to the failure of the filmmakers to grasp the full scale of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution  for Europe's Jews. PBS notes that a 1941 British Ministry of Information guideline advised war propagandists to deal with "the treatment of indisputably innocent people, not with violent political opponent
caption: Alfred Hitchcock was involved in the production as an advisor.
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