Night Will Fall

Footage from the 1945 liberations of Nazi concentration camps is finally released in the devastating and utterly necessary "Night Will Fall."

Andre Singer recounts the British Ministry of Information's Sidney Bernstein and his cameramen shooting "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey" in order to document World War Two atrocities. Due to its unflinching shots of "dead prisoners hurled out and stacked in twisted heaps," piles of eye glasses, shoes and human hair, this "forgotten masterpiece of British documentary cinema" was "too painful" to finish or watch, and was therefore abandoned, unfinished until now, 70 years later.

Several of the prisoners pictured in the liberation footage are still alive (some were twins on which Josef Mengele experimented), and they reflect on the British soldiers they remember entering their camp.

Anita said, "You spend years preparing to die, then you're still here."

Another said, "We thought we were dreaming; every British soldier looked like a god to us."

Some heard the Scottish bagpipers at the front of the unit and thought, "I'm in heaven."

Some of the living filmmakers remembered, through tears, the appalling smell and the "half-dead people with glazed eyes, like dummies or dolls; the hopelessness and despair." They were shocked that the surrounding villages were filled with beautiful, bucolic farms, fat farm animals and German citizens seemingly unaware of the horror down the road (in fact, the soldiers walked the villagers through the camps to show them, and had the captured or surrendered SS soldiers assist in burying the bodies).

The first set of films took over two weeks to complete, but it was so horrific that the BBC refused to broadcast it. Alfred Hitchcock was brought in to supervise the editing, and wanted to use maps to show how close "regular" towns were to the death camps.

Winston Churchill noted that, "It could be anyone, anywhere if civilization breaks down this way" and that these films provided the "proofs of these frightful crimes."

This evidence "helped the soldiers know what they were fighting for" as well as assist the prosecution at the Nuremburg trials, although the Soviets had already been filming Polish camps since 1944, including still-smoking crematoriums, barrels of Zyklon gas, and "ashes, ashes, ashes."

General Eisenhower took congressmen, senators and British leaders and others "who had no idea what had been going on" to the camps to see "the putrid bodies, like cord wood" as Bernstein's team started using color film as well.

Narrated by Helena Bonham Carter, this film needs to be required viewing, because "unless the world learns the lessons these pictures teach, night will fall."

"But, by God's grace, we who live will learn."

"Night Will Fall"
DVD
$21.99
http://www.hbo.com/documentaries/night-will-fall