Summary: Film documentary about Dachau concentration camp.
Description:The film uses stock footage to describe briefly the rise of Hitler, the legal justification of terror tactics and the opening of Dachau as a camp for political prisoners, anti-semitism and the purge of German Jews after the Kristallnacht. The story of war-time Dachau is told in the words of an ex-prisoner - over a montage of photographs taken by an SS officer. Events following the Allied capture of the camp are shown on period film - shots of post-liberation celebrations, emaciated prisoners, disposal of mass dead, etc., and filmed reactions of the local inhabitants as they are shown corpses piled in a concrete chamber. Description of camp life - little of this is known outside, as released prisoners must swear to silence. The local population befriended workers drawn from the camp and gave them pieces of bread, or at the very least "a sympathetic glance". Despite some suspicions - in the final months the smell of the camp crematoria blanketed the whole region - it is only after the Allied liberation that the local inhabitants realise the full truth, "that the name of their town cannot be separated from this [the camp]".
