What They Found
Photo: James Wickham (IWM volunteer). IWM London
On 26 March IWM London hosted a premiere of What They Found, a documentary produced in association with IWM.
The evening started with an introduction from the film’s director Sam Mendes, followed by a Q&A session moderated by Director-General Caro Howell with the film’s editor Andy Worboys, producer Simon Chinn, and IWM’s Head of Public History James Bulgin.
Archive footage and first-hand testimonies tell the story of two members of the British Army's Film and Photographic Unit
Senior Film Curator Fiona Kelly was IWM’s Archive Film Consultant. The film features extensive footage of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 shot by two members of the Army Film and Photographic Unit, Sergeants Bill Lawrie and Mike Lewis, accompanied by audio interviews with the men recorded by IWM in the 1980s.
"By immersing audiences in their eyewitness accounts through the footage they shot, combined with audio interviews describing their experiences in detail, the film becomes an intimate and personal record of two ordinary men’s defining experience of the war and, through them, of the profound trauma and tragedy of the Holocaust." (BBC)
What They Found will air on Monday 7 April at 10pm on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer.
Image: IWM (BU 6955). A soldier stands in front of a sign at the entrance to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Germany, 29 May 1945.
Capturing evidence of the crimes of the Holocaust at Bergen-Belsen
On 15 April 1945, British troops discovered Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp in Northwest Germany. Thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally ill people were packed together without food, water or basic sanitation. Many were suffering from typhus, dysentery and starvation.
Two cameramen from the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), Sergeants Mike Lewis and Bill Lawrie, were sent to record footage of the conditions at the camp. The silent footage they captured would be the first the world would see showing the crimes of the Holocaust.
Find out more
The liberation of Bergen-Belsen
View Bergen-Belsen footage in the IWM collection (please note not all media is available to view for senstivity reasons)
For further information and help with archive research, contact the Image & Film Licensing team.
Image: IWM (BU 8352). Sergeant Mike Lewis of the Army Film Unit who filmed the liberation of Belsen.
