For 70 years it has been one of the great mysteries of British cinema. What truth is there to the claim that, at the end of the Second World War, Alfred Hitchcock directed a never-seen documentary about the German concentration camps? Was the film suppressed by the British government because it was too horrifying and politically incendiary?
Over the years this elusive film — often referred to as “the lost Hitchcock” — has acquired a mythological status. A tantalising newspaper story in 1984 was headlined “The Horror Film That Hitchcock Couldn’t Bear to Watch” after it was mentioned in a biography of Sidney Bernstein. Lord Bernstein, who later set up Granada TV, was a leading British producer who had been head of the film section for the British-US Psychological Warfare Division during the war.
Before he died, Bernstein revealed that he and Hitchcock had indeed worked on a documentary about the German concentration camps. But for three decades after the war, the film, said to be shockingly graphic, completely disappeared. In 1984, five grainy black and white reels were screened, with rough sound and no commentary, to a stunned audience at the Berlin film festival. Around the same time fragments were shown on British and American television.
Until very recently, though, no one had seen the completed film. Towards the end of 1945, with 100,000 feet of footage in the can, Bernstein and Hitchcock were forced to abandon their film by the British government. The controversial political reasons for that are only now becoming clear.
As the British, American and Soviet armies advanced into Germany in the spring of 1945, they discovered what had only been whispered about before: German concentration camps of such size and brutal efficiency that the horror was impossible to comprehend.
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A week after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British and Canadian troops on April 15, 1945, Bernstein, who was Jewish, travelled there himself. The liberating troops had found 60,000 emaciated inmates, 500 a day dying from typhoid. As army cameramen filmed the gruesome scenes, the troops made the camp guards bury 13,000 bodies in giant pits.
“We had an army film unit there,” Bernstein later told the writer Elizabeth Sussex, “and big graves were being dug, and the skeletons were being bulldozed in to clear the site because of disease and so on, and I thought, this isn’t good enough. I said, the burgermeister and all the people in the nearest village had to come and watch all this happening so we could prove they knew about it.”
Bernstein quickly wrote a proposal for a joint British/US “Motion Picture on German Atrocities”. The film was approved by the British and American governments as a matter of urgency. It would be shown in cinemas to the German population in the British and American zones of occupation.
“By showing the German people specific crimes committed by the Nazis in their name . . .” Bernstein wrote of the film’s purpose, “by reminding the German people of their past acquiescence in the perpetration of such crimes, to make them aware that they cannot escape sharing the responsibility for them . . . It will have to be assumed that in several years time the Nazis will either try to disprove the evidence or suggest that only a minority was responsible.”
In May 1945, Bernstein began looking for a director. He approached his old friend Alfred Hitchcock, who was then working in Hollywood. “I wanted the imaginative touch that someone like Hitchcock could give,” he said.
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Hitchcock had become the most famous British director with thrillers such as The 39 Steps and The Lady Vanishes. Hitchcock was keen to show willing in the war effort because he had been very hurt by criticism from the British author JB Priestley and others that he had moved to Hollywood just before the war out of cowardice.
In fact, Hitchcock had returned to London for a few months at the end of 1943 to make two propaganda films for the Ministry of Information and Bernstein, for the token payment of £10 per week. More importantly to Hitchcock, the Ministry of Information put him up in his favourite London hotel, Claridge’s.
It was to Claridge’s that Hitchcock returned at the end of June 1945 at Bernstein’s request, to direct the “atrocity film”. In the middle of July, Bernstein wrote that Hitchcock had “been working on the film since he arrived. He will not take a fee for his work.”
Peter Tanner, one of the editors, later told Kay Gladstone, historical adviser on the restored documentary, that he recalled at least two meetings with Hitchcock at Claridge’s, where “he did outline to me at considerable length the kind of form he thought the material should take”.
“He had a suite there and he paced up and down and talked about it and had a lot of ideas as to what should be done,” Tanner told the writer Elizabeth Sussex. “One of his things was that we should try to prevent people thinking that any of this was faked . . .” by using long takes.
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Bernstein later explained Hitchcock’s other main contribution: by using simple maps, the film should show how close the concentration camps were to German population centres.
“[Hitchcock] took a circle round each concentration camp as it were on a map, different villages, different places and the numbers of people [near by] — so they must have known about it,” Bernstein said. Showing that appalling crimes had been committed in such apparently normal environs is Hitchcock’s most distinctive aesthetic contribution.
According to Gladstone, Tanner, the editor, “also recalled Hitchcock suggesting the sequence in the final reel covering the possessions of the dead at Auschwitz, the harrowing montage of hair, wedding rings, spectacles and toothbrushes”.
But by the time Hitchcock returned to Hollywood at the end of July 1945, the British political and military authorities — who in May had been so keen to produce the “atrocity film” to screen to Germans – were now equally determined it should be shelved. On August 4, 1945, Bernstein received a letter from the Foreign Office.
“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 Commander-in-Chief who will say, ‘No atrocity film’,” wrote D McLachlan from the political intelligence department of the Foreign Office.
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Bernstein realised that the film was being suppressed because of government fears that the power of its appalling images would undermine the fragile morale of the recently defeated German population. With responsibility for the most populous sector of Germany, the government was becoming extremely worried about the huge costs of occupation on a British economy that was itself in tatters.
“The military command just didn’t want it,” Bernstein said bluntly. There was also concern in the British government that the noses of Germans should not be rubbed in the bloody horrors in which many were implicated because they were needed as allies in the coming Cold War with the Soviet Union.
In 1952, the original footage, the script and other related material was quietly transferred from the War Office to the vaults of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in London. The first time the film resurfaced was at the Berlin film festival in 1984. In 2008, the IWM decided to complete the documentary according to the intentions of the original film-makers, including Bernstein and Hitchcock, using the original script and shot lists.
Now, 70 years after it was suppressed, British audiences will finally be able to see the film. It has been completed (and digitally remastered) under its original working title, Concentration Camps Factual Survey. It will be premiered before the end of the year. In mid-September, another film, Night Will Fall, which explores the making of the original film, will be released. Night Will Fall is directed by André Singer, produced by Sally Angel and narrated by Helena Bonham-Carter.
There is no doubt of Hitchcock’s influence on the shape and tone of the documentary. But the time he started working on it at the end of June 1945, most of the footage had already been shot. And Hitchcock went back to Hollywood a month later, to begin shooting Notorious, starring Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant. So it’s a stretch to call him the “director”. He is now described as “treatment adviser”.
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Toby Haggith, who directed the restoration for the IWM, believes that the understandable interest over the years in Hitchcock’s role, and to a lesser extent in that of Bernstein, has obscured the work of the film’s unsung heroes: its cameramen.
“These army cameramen were often working class, hardly known,” Haggith said. “But if you look at their camerawork, you see how brilliant it is. Given the fact that they had no direction, they had to instinctively respond to unprecedented scenes and make sense of them. They are the people who also made this film. They self-directed.”
It’s now clear that the political suppression of the Bernstein-Hitchcock documentary had serious effects on Germans and Germany. It wasn’t until the American TV drama miniseries Holocaust was broadcast in 1979 in West Germany, where it was watched by 50 per cent of the adult population that many Germans really became aware of the full extent of the barbaric crimes of the Third Reich.
Given this, the final words of the long-suppressed documentary have an even more powerful resonance: “Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall.”
Night Will Fall opens in cinemas nationwide on September 19. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey will be screened in the BFI London Film Festival in October