MEMORY OF THE CAMPS [Allocated Title]

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  • Title: MEMORY OF THE CAMPS [Allocated Title]
  • Film Number: A70 515
  • Other titles:
  • Summary: Fine-cut mute version of a documentary based on archive film of the concentration camps liberated by British and American forces in Western Europe, and the extermination camps freed by the Red Army in Eastern Europe, intended for screening to German audiences in Occupied Germany, but left incomplete when the Americans withdrew from this initially joint British-US production to compile their own shorter indictment of Nazi atrocities, DIE TODESMÜHLEN [DEATH MILLS].
  • Description: START 00:00:33 Reel 1. Sound film sequences from Leni Riefenstahl's 'Triumph of the Will' showing Adolf Hitler receiving an ecstatic reception from Nazi supporters packed into the Congress Hall on 10 September 1934 and speaking in his usual vigorous oratorical style (these last shots are mute). He is seen almost six years later on 6 July 1940 making a triumphal return to Berlin at the end of the victorious Blitzkrieg campaign in western Europe. 00:03:55 The film abruptly cuts to a close-up of a German signboard for Belsen and opens a sequence featuring shots of the attractive old village of Belsen and its population - in stark contrast to the grim architecture in the concentration camp a short distance away. Soldiers serving with the British Second Army (63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery) are seen riding on one of their Morris Quad artillery tractors as they escort an old German truck in use by an SS burial party through Camp No. 1 and riding shot-gun on Bedford MW water trucks (this last shot filmed on 16 April 1945 less than 24 hours after the British first arrived inside the camp); intercut with shots of children and women inmates gathered behind barbed wire fences and smiling at the camera. (In 2006, one of the women behind the wire was identified by Mania Salinger as herself.) The film shows the first efforts made by the British to bring drinkable water and food to those people they found in Belsen - sweets from a tin, hot soup and bread. With scenes also filmed on 16 April 1945, it proceeds to chronicle the humanitarian disaster area that the camp had become in the last months of Nazi rule. Emaciated, exhausted and sick survivors living among the dead and filfth. A woman (identified by the USHMM as Rosalie Weisner) tearfully grasping the arm of AFPU Lieutenant Martyn Wilson. A rubbish-strewn camp compound used as an outside latrine by the inmates. A badly-emaciated man examining his shirt for lice. The living walking past a dead body without showing any apparent unease. The corpse of a fully-clothed young man with a thin stream of blood from his mouth. 00:06:16 The next sequences illustrate the conditions in Camp No. 1. Armed British soldiers, looking dazed by what they are seeing, move about outside one of the wooden barrack huts. A glimpse into the gloomy and squalid interior of a typical barrack hut reveals more corpses. Dead and dying lie side by side in the open amid piles of discarded rags and clothing and, in an area of open ground some distance from the rest of the camp, some of the 10,000 bodies found lying around Belsen by the British await burial. The majority of the corpses, stripped of clothing and at various stages of decomposition, is female but there are also many male cadavers sprawled across the ground. Nearby, there is a partly-filled burial pit dug while the SS was still in charge of the camp. The film cuts abruptly from a mid-shot of two emaciated male bodies to a very tight shot of the SS 'Totenkopf' or Death's Head insignia on the collar patch of one of the camp guards. 00:08:45 Some of the 49 SS men and 26 SS 'Aufseherinnen' (female warders) who stayed behind in the camp after the rest had fled are seen on 17 April 1945 in the custody of troops from the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment RA. The film editors have dropped in a shot of three women survivors yelling at an SS burial party between these shots and close-ups of the camp commandant, SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Kramer, dubbed by the British press 'The Beast of Belsen'. The captive SS men and women are marched off in pairs under guard to begin the collection and interment of the thousands of unburied bodies all over the camp. 00:09:24 Among them is SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Dr Fritz Klein, who is seen wearing a white arm band on his left arm to denote that he had been participating in a truce arranged between the British Second Army and the German 1. Fallschirmjager Armee around Belsen. Another cutaway shot showing several women survivors clapping and shouting abuse at an SS burial party at work has been inserted in between the shots of the SS men and the SS women (all of whom are wearing white arm bands) being marched off to work. The reel ends with shots of Hungarian soldiers digging another mass grave with the assistance of a small air-portable bulldozer used by Royal Engineers serving with the 6th Airborne Division (?). 00:09:57 Reel 2. Scenes filmed on 17 April 1945 showing the SS guards collecting corpses, mainly female, from the main women's camp inside Camp No. 1 and heaving them onto the back of an old German civilian truck with cutaway shots filmed in the compound where the actual mass burial took place showing women survivors shouting insults at them and being prevented by a British soldier from physically assaulting them. 00:11:08 Dr Klein and four other SS-men are seen riding in the truck filled with cadavers. The film shows the SS burial party and their corpse-filled truck arriving in the compound at the western end of No. 1 Camp where the mass burial will take place, watched by a crowd of angry women survivors. Pairs of SS men and women carry bodies to a big burial pit and drop them unceremoniously into it. The SS women guards are seen at work at one end of a burial pit while their males counterparts are busy at the other end. This sequence concludes with a shot of two SS women dragging a female corpse to the edge of the pit and heaving it in, with the camera following the cadaver as it falls lifelessly onto the pile of bodies below. 00:14:02 The film reveals a section of the camp from one of the watch towers, where survivors can be seen moving about; several corpses can be seen lying on the ground at the point where they finally succumbed to starvation and disease. Some of the survivors are seen on the road to recovery, being fed with hot soup, cooking food over open fires, collecting clean water from stand pipes set up by Royal Engineers, washing clothes, taking a hot shower assembled by a Mobile Bath Unit (completely naked in spite of the presence of the camera) drying their washing on a barbed wire fence, putting on clean clothes, shaking down an eiderdown and brushing dust off a jacket. This section ends with close-ups of a man shaving and a woman (identified in the cameraman's dope sheet as Trudy Torturdo) combing her hair in front of a mirror. 00:16:39 The film returns to the grim subject of the continuing disposal of the thousands of unburied bodies in No. 1 Camp. SS men are forced by their British captors to push two broken-down vehicles in use by the burial detail. Scenes filmed on 24 April 1945 by Paul Wyand of British Movietonews with a sound camera and Sergeants Lewis and Lawrie, two Army Film and Photographic Unit cameramen equipped only with mute cameras, show the SS men carrying naked female corpses from the truck to another burial pit. The scene is accompanied by shouts of abuse from the crowd of women survivors, who maintain an almost permanent presence at the site, and the rough encouragement of their British guards from the 113th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment RA. The survivor loudest in expressing her rage is a Lodz Ghetto and Auschwitz survivor, Hella Goldstein. Six German local government officials from Celle, a town near Belsen, are also seen watching the spectacle. 00:18:17 All of the SS men look dirty and exhausted from their labours, including Dr Fritz Klein who is seen lifting a cadaver off the back of the broken-down truck. They are no longer physically capable of lifting the bodies so they have to drag them on their backs to the edge of the burial pit. The lifeless feet on one corpse trail patterns in the sandy soil. An AFPU cameraman, Sergeant Mike Lewis, is seen filming the activity with his clockwork DeVry 35mm camera. Two SS men are seen sorting out the corpses at the bottom of the burial pit. 00:19:41 Dr Fritz Klein (prompted by someone out of shot) addresses Paul Wyand's sound camera in German as the work of burying the dead continues in the background, "'My name is Doctor Fritz Klein. I've been in this camp for one and a half years. I was born on 24 November 1888. I'm 58 years old, a German from Rumania. I am speaking today on 24 April 1945". 00:20:04 SS female and male guards lined up and standing to attention under the watch of armed British soldiers and the German local government officials standing stiffly with sombre expressions near the burial pit listen to an off-screen voice reading in an English accent a German translation of an English script (there are cuts in the soundtrack) condemning the German people for their complicity with Nazi crimes. 00:21:56 The final shots in this reel show a group of frail-looking women survivors in the pale sunshine among pine trees in No. 1 Camp. 00:22:17 Reel 3. A shot of a large sign erected by the British authorities at the entrance to the camp warning in English, French and German of the presence of typhus. Shots showing three Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC) officers working for No. 7 Mobile Bacteriological Unit examining a petri dish, test tubes and a slide under a microscope containing biological samples taken in Belsen inside their mobile laboratory and a woman survivor who is probably infested with lice facing away from the camera and scratching her bare back. RAMC personnel serving with the 11th Field Ambulance dressed in protective clothing against typhus remove a woman on a stretcher from a wooden barracks hut and put her into an Austin K2 ambulance as the evacuation of Camp No. 1 gets underway. A Humber light ambulance arrives at the stable block of the panzer training school barracks known by the British as Camp No. 2, a mile from the main camp. A patient is carried by German medical personnel into the 'human laundry' established by the RAMC in the panzer barrack's stable block. 00:23:11 The 'Human Laundry' showing German women nurses washing and scraping clean the dirt off the naked bodies of survivors lying on flat tables. German army medical orderlies wearing white overalls are seen carrying a survivor out on a stretcher to a waiting RAMC Austin K2 ambulance (where Hungarian soldiers pressed into service as medical auxiliaries can be seen). A uniformed British woman driver (identified in the cameraman's dope sheet as Miss Russell Smith of the British Red Cross Relief Team No. 103) sits behind the wheel of an Austin K2 ambulance as she drives to a hospital block inside Camp No. 2. 00:24:34 One of the modern three-storey barrack blocks inside the German panzer training school taken over by the British authorities in Belsen as a hospital, complete with a big Red Cross symbol on the roof. Inside one of the many hospital wards, British and German nurses are seen replacing the bandages on the back of a pretty but severely emaciated young woman, taking the temperature of a female patient who has a thermometer placed under her arm pit and taking a blood sample from another patient. 00:24:56 The theme of the gradual recovery of the survivors' health and their dignity is continued with a sequence showing healthy child and teenage survivors being summoned for a meal by Luba Tryszynska, a Polish nurse known as 'the Angel of Belsen', seen here ringing a hand bell. Inside a dining hall, young children are fed with pieces of chocolate and hot soup. 00:25:42 At one of the stables in Camp No. 2, women survivors wearing just blankets and pyjamas are helped out of an Austin K2 ambulance into a stable next to a cheerfully-painted sign for 'Harrods', the store where they are fitted out with second-hand clothes and shoes. A teenage boy is helped into a sleeveless sweater by a St John Ambulance Brigade woman volunteer and does up the buttons on his cuff. 00:26:40 In the children's section of the hospital in No. 2 Camp, two little girls (sisters?) sharing the same hospital bed sip little mugs of hot broth; another toddler is spoon-fed by one of the nurses and is stared at with intense concentration by three other children sitting on the next bed. A nurse removes the heater lamp over a new-born child wrapped in swaddling clothes. Another toddler is spoon-fed by a German nurse. Two little boys pose shyly for the camera with their new cuddly toys. 00:27:26 The film cuts abruptly to shots showing the male SS burial party guarded by men from 113th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment RA working in the rain, dragging corpses by their feet across the bare soggy ground and being made to sort out the cadavers in a burial pit. 00:28:14 A British soldier from the 113th Light Anti-Aircraft Regiment RA standing in front of a microphone addresses Paul Wyand's sound camera, "Today is the 24 April 1945. My name is Gunner Illingworth and I live in Cheshire. I am at present in Belsen Camp doing guard duty over the SS men. The things in this camp are beyond describing. When you actually see them for yourself you know what you are fighting for here. Picture (sic) in the paper can't describe it at all. The things that they have committed, well, nobody would think they were human at all. We actually know now what has been going on in these camps and I know personally what I am fighting for." 00:28:51 The Reverend T J Stretch, an Anglican padre from Wales, standing behind the microphone in front of a burial pit, addresses the sound camera on 23 April 1945, "I am the Reverend T J Stretch attached as padre to the formation concerning this camp. My home is at Fishguard, my parish was at Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth. I've been here eight days and never in my life have I seen such damnable ghastliness. This morning we buried over five thousand bodies, we don't know who they are. Behind me, you can see a pit which will contain another five thousand. There are two others like it in preparation. All these deaths have been caused by systematic starvation and typhus and disease, which have been spread because of the treatment meted out to these poor people by their SS guards and their SS chief". 00:29:38 The concluding section to this part of the film shows the cleaning up of Camp No. 1, beginning with shots showing bareheaded SS men standing to attention by a mass grave as British and Polish priests (Father Morrison and Father Kadziola from Poland) and a British army rabbi, Reverend Leslie Hardman, say prayers for the dead. 00:30:28 A driver is seen climbing on board his bulldozer and starting it up, followed by shots taken at another time showing a dozer blade fitted to an airborne engineers bulldozer spreading sandy soil over one of the mass graves. 00:31:02 Scenes filmed on 19 May 1945 show a stream of burning oil flame arching from a Wasp IIC flamethrower carrier manned by men from the 4th Battalion Somerset Light Infantry into the open doorway of an empty wooden barrack hut. Thick black clouds of smoke and flame billow from abandoned wooden barrack huts after they have been torched. The large bulldozer is seen scooping up rags, rubbish, foul liquid and earth and a barbed wire fence. The Belsen section of the film concludes with shots of a mass grave in Camp No. 1 and signs put up by the British on the ten mass graves in the first three weeks after the liberation. The close-up of one of the grave markers mixes through to a black dot captioned 'Belsen' and pulls back to reveal the camp's location on a map of Germany showing its 1937 frontiers and a rash of other dots indicating the scores of major concentration camps, forced labour camps and death centres scattered throughout the country and in neighbouring Poland, Czechoslovakia and Austria. 00:33:18 Reel 4. Fade up from black to reveal the location of Dachau concentration camp on the north-west outskirts of Munich, the capital of Bavaria. The section showing Dachau concentration camp, the first such establishment created by the Nazis in March 1933, opens with a long aerial shot of the closely-packed barrack huts on either side of a tree-lined central avenue beyond the main parade ground or 'Appelplatz', where roll-calls of the prisoners took place. A shot of a big Eagle and Swastika emblem over the main entrance and the view from one of the watchtowers overlooking the 'Appelplatz', framed with a German steel helmet and a Czech-manufactured ZB37 light machine-gun (known to the German army as the MG37(t)), complete with a belt of ammunition in the breech, in the foreground. 00:34:01 A dolly-mounted camera operated by a US Signal Corps camera crew shows some of the 32,000 prisoners liberated by troops belonging to the Seventh US Army who overran Dachau on 29 April 1945 standing behind a metal grille gateway decorated with the camp motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (Work sets you Free) in metal lettering. It travels into the 'Appelplatz' past a large number of male inmates and then tracks along the camp's central avenue past long low barrack huts on either side. Most of the freed prisoners seen here appear to be in relatively good physical shape but they stare silently at the camera without any evident emotion. There are close-ups of male prisoners from all over Europe and, possibly, North Africa, and include a young Soviet prisoner-of-war with the Red Star on his army cap. Shots filmed at the open windows of one barrack hut showing prisoners lying in bunk beds and on the window sills staring silently at the camera testify to the overcrowded conditions in Dachau. 00:36:04 Interior shots inside one hut show sick and wasted-looking male prisoners lying under blankets and jammed up close together, the living next to the dead. Able-bodied inmates carry the body of one of their comrades who has just expired out of the hut. Outside, the dead are seen laid out in rows for collection and removal to the camp crematorium. Seriously-ill male survivors are seen being taken out of the camp hospital and transported on a hand-pulled waggon by fellow inmates to a US Army field hospital nearby. Some of the few women prisoners found at Dachau at the time of its liberation are seen in a compound screened by straw fencing, peering through the holes they have made in the straw and talking to a male inmate. 00:38:41 Scenes inside Baracke X, the clothes disinfection-cum-crematorium block screened off from the rest of the camp and equipped with five functioning gas chambers which in fact were never used to exterminate prisoners. The inscription 'Brausebad' (Shower) painted on the lintel above the open door leading into one of the gas chambers, the two inlets for the Zyklon B gas inside the chamber near the ceiling and covered in metal grilles and a fake shower head in the ceiling. A big air-tight container marked 'Giftgas' (Poison Gas), 'Zyklon B' for used for storing hydrocyanic pellets (which, when exposed to air inside a confined space, produce lethal hydrogen cyanide). The control panel that operated the Degesch-manufactured Zyklon B pumping machinery marked 'Aus' (on) and 'Ein' (off). A hand operating the gear wheel to open the gas inlets leading into the disinfection chamber. The two gas shafts at the side or rear of the gas chamber and one of the ventilator outlets, sealed by a metal grill, low down near the floor. A pile of male cadavres awaiting cremation. A sign in German which translates as 'Cleanliness is a duty here. Therefore wash your hands'. 00:39:49 Scenes inside Baracke X's crematorium built in 1942-1943 to cope with Dachau's rising mortality rate, showing the double two-muffle furnace and incinerated human remains inside one of the ovens. Exterior shots showing large heaps of clothing, mainly striped camp uniforms, awaiting disinfection in the four disinfection gas chambers. Clothes hanging out to dry in the open air after being impregnated with Zyklon B - just visible is a notice painted in white on one of the big doors under the portico warning people not to open it as there is deadly gas inside. Light snow is seen falling in all the exterior scenes filmed inside Baracke X. 00:40:48 Shots showing some of the thirty railway goods waggons that arrived at the camp railway siding in Dachau on 28 April 1945 after a three-week journey from Buchenwald in which 2,000 inmates out of 5,000 had perished from cold, hunger and disease. Bodies covered in snow lying by the railway line and inside one long open-topped waggon. Filmed subsequently on a warm spring day are shots of the main signals box at Dachau railway station. 00:41:32 Fade up from black to reveal the location of Buchenwald concentration camp between Erfurt and Weimar, opened in July 1937 and liberated by troops of the Third US Army on 11-12 April 1945 (the first major concentration camp to fall into the hands of the Anglo-American forces advancing from the Rhine). Shots of the main gate, decorated by a black flag as a sign of mourning for President Franklin D Roosevelt, who died on 13 April 1945, the metal grille gate at the main entrance identical in pattern to the one at Dachau but with the inscription in metal lettering 'Jeden Das Sein' (which roughly translates as 'To Each His Own'). A view of the big 'Appelplatz' ringed by a large number of low wooden barrack huts. Male survivors are seen in the spaces between the buildings in the SS compound, cooking food over open fires. Shots of two emaciated male corpses, including one with the number '19470' tattoed across his stomach, and a young man, sitting up against the concrete wall of one of the SS blocks, staring at the camera with a wary expression as he eats half a loaf of bread. A panning shot along a row of eight emaciated teenage boys with bare skinny legs, some with recently applied bandages, standing behind a barbed wire fence. A mid-shot of two male inmates, stripped to the waist to reveal skeletal torsoes, sitting out the ground. A crudely-fashioned wooden club used to beat camp prisoners is brandished by a survivor. A close-up of another inmate whose nose and right eye bear terrible injuries inflicted from a beating by a 'kapo' or SS guard. Scenes outside and inside a barrack hut in Buchenwald - the healthier inmates standing about in the open air, smoking cigarettes given to them by American soldiers, whilst the sick ones remain in their bunk beds. 00:43:50 Reel 5. Scenes inside a barrack hut in which its occupants, including a young boy, gather around a stove and receive a meal of hot stew and are seen sitting on a bunk bed eating crumbs of bread. A view of Buchenwald's crematorium block, located behind two rows of barbed wire fences and dominated by its rectangular-sectioned chimney. Inside a compound surrounded by a wall, a pile of naked male corpses is seen awaiting cremation. Shots inside the crematorium itself reveal six ovens arranged as a double triple-muffle furnace, the metal manufacturer's plate on the furnace - 'Maschinenfabrik. J A Topf & Sohne. Erfurt' - and incinerated human remains in two of the ovens. 00:44:49 Members of Parliament sent by the British government to Germany as eyewitnesses gaze at the pile of cadavers in the crematorium block compound and write down their observations in little note books, Mavis Tait MP talks to two teenage survivors who roll up their shirt sleeves to show her their left forearms. Two other British MPs go over to talk to a group of American soldiers. 00:45:22 Scenes filmed on 16 April 1945 showing some of the estimated 1,500-2,000 inhabitants of Weimar heading on foot to Buchenwald in order to be shown the horrors that had been going on just six miles from their homes. The smiles seen on their faces as they approach the camp and file through the main gate into the 'Appelplatz' disappear as they are shown by a camp survivor a display of human bones, glass laboratory jars containing human organs from prisoners killed for scientific research and a collection of two shrunken heads and tattooed pieces of human skin.The Germans, the majority of them women, appear genuinely shocked and tearful. Camp survivors are seen assisting two women who have fainted after seeing the shocking evidence. 00:46:30 Fade up from black to reveal a map showing Ebensee, a labour camp established in November 1943 on Lake Trauern between Gemund and Bad Ischl in the Salzburg district of Austria and captured by soldiers of the 80th US Infantry Division on 4-5 May 1945. Shots showing the idyllic Alpine lakeside location of Ebensee, neat Alpine cottages, a wayside religious shrine common in this devout Catholic region, contented-looking villagers, young couples relaxing by the water and older menfolk wearing traditional Austrian felt hats. Against an Alpine backdrop of pine trees and snow-covered mountain peaks, skeletal figures appear in front of the camera. The camera surveys the camp where 16,000 inmates assigned to build tunnels into the mountains nearby were incarcerated and inspects a sign put up by the SS camp administration next to a perimeter barbed wire fence ordering all unauthorised personnel to keep away from the crematorium. 00:47:56 Shots of naked and extremely emaciated male prisoners, who are held up by fitter comrades for the camera. A view of the tall rectangular-sectioned chimney and two inmates carrying a cadaver through the entrance into the crematorium itself from a hand cart which has several other naked male corpses on it. 00:49:00 Fade up from black to show a map with the location of the main Mauthausen concentration camp complex, established near Linz in August 1938 shortly after the 'Anschluss' of Austria with Germany and liberated by soldiers from the Third US Army on 5 May 1945. Views of Gusen camp, opened in December 1939, reveals large numbers of close-packed barrack huts adjacent to the camp stone quarry and barrack huts behind a double-row barbed wire perimeter fence. A naked and skeletal male inmate is helped by a much fitter comrade to take a few steps in front of the camera. Outside the Gusen camp crematorium, naked male cadavers lie in a pile; inside a double-muffle furnace lie incinerated human remains. 00:49:38 Fade up from black to reveal the location of Wobbelin concentration camp outside Ludwigslust between Hamburg and Wittenberg liberated by the 82nd US Airborne Division on 2 May 1945. Scenes filmed inside the camp, part of the Neuengamme complex, show the big 'Appelplatz' and barrack huts beyond it. Sick, exhausted and emaciated male survivors are helped into the back of a truck by their fitter comrades. The corpses of camp inmates shot dead by the SS guards before they fled from the advancing American forces are seen scattered throughout the interior of the camp's washing or laundry block. Inside one barrack hut, the camera examines crudely-made three-tiered wooden bunk beds covered with straw bedding and the decomposing remains of a male prisoner lying in one of the bunks. Inside another gloomy hut, there are more crudely-fashioned three-tier bunk beds and a mass of tightly-coiled barbed wire used as a punishment mattress (?). 00:51:08 Fade up from black to reveal the location of Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald established in November 1944 near the city of Gotha in Thuringia, overrun by units of the Third US Army on 4 April 1945 - the first major atrocity site discovered by US troops in Germany. Scenes filmed by US cameramen inside the camp show no survivors, only a dozen or so corpses lying on the ground outside the hospital block where they were murdered by the departing SS camp guards and, inside one hut used as a hospital, a wooden stool and straw palliasses scattered about the floor. In a stone quarry nearby, the camera surveys an improvised crematorium consisting of steel rails, coal and charred logs of wood upon which there can be seen incinerated human remains, including whole bodies and skulls. 00:52:09 Fade up from black to reveal a map showing Leipzig and Thekla, an industrial suburb in the north-eastern corner of the city, where on 19 April 1945 the Third US Army's 69th US Infantry Division overran a slave labour camp. The film reveals an area of scorched ground, the site of a barrack hut containing approximately 325 male inmates too ill to move that had been torched by their SS guards 24 hours earlier, and examines in detail the bodies of slaughtered slave labourers who tried to escape from the inferno. They have been either partly or wholly consumed by fire and lie in contorted and agonised postures near a thickly-coiled barbed wire fence. In a few instances, the bodies lie next to and on top of the wire itself. 00:53:42 Fade up to reveal a map showing Gardelegen, a town near Stendal overrun by troops of the Ninth US Army on 18 April 1945. Shots filmed by US cameramen show a large barn in open country on the Isenschnibbe estate outside Gardelegen into which 1,800 prisoners being transported from Rottleberode camp were herded by their SS guards and local volunteers on 13 April before it was set on fire. There are big scorch marks above two barn doors and bodies which belong to prisoners shot dead as they tried to flee from the conflagration on the ground. More human remains, some still smouldering after several days, are seen heaped up near one of the big barn doors and throughout the interior of the building. The camera pays special attention to a group of prisoners who almost succeeded in escaping by either breaking through or burrowing under the big wooden barn door. More scorched and decomposing bodies are seen lined up against the barn wall. 00:55:02 Fade up from black to reveal a map showing the location of Auschwitz near Katowice (Kattowitz) and Sosnowiec in Upper Silesia. The scale of Auschwitz-Birkenau (Auschwitz II), established early in 1942, is evident from an aerial shot taken from a low-flying Soviet aircraft flying over the huge Men's Camp along a south-east - north-west axis shortly after the liberation of the camp on 27 January 1945 by the 332nd Soviet Rifle Division. At the entrance to the 'Stammlager' (Auschwitz I), established in May 1940 for German criminals and Polish political prisoners, there is the infamous 'Arbeit Macht Frei' camp slogan first used at Dachau. Panning and static shots of tired, haggard and malnourished male survivors staring at the camera from behind an electrified fence at Auschwitz I. Brief close-ups of teenagers in striped concentration camp uniforms in both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. 00:56:07 END
  • Alternative Title:
  • Colour: B&W
  • Digitised:
  • Object_Number: A70 515
  • Sound: Sound (part silent)
  • Access Conditions: IWM Attribution: © IWM
  • Featured Period: 1939-1945
  • Production Date: 1945
  • Production Country: GB
  • Production Details: Psychological Warfare Division (PWD), Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) (Production sponsor) Ministry of Information (Production company) Bernstein, Sidney Lewis1899-01-301993-02-05 (Production individual) Nolbandov, Sergei (Production individual) McAllister, Stewart (Production individual) Tanner, Peter (Production individual) Hitchcock, Alfred (Production individual) Wills, Colin Frederick George1906-01-171965 (Production individual) Crossman, Richard (Production individual) Wills, Colin Frederick George1906-01-171965 (Production individual) Zuckerman, Solly1904-05-301993-04-01 (Production individual) Lawrie, William Fairlie1919-07-01Family origin: Glasgow, Scotland (Production individual) Lewis, C M (Production individual) Hewitt C. H. (Sergeant) (Production individual) Haywood, Harold (Production individual) Parkinson, (Sergeant) (Production individual) Wilson, Martyn (Production individual) Wyand, Paul (Production individual) Brooke (Sergeant) (Production individual) Bush (Staff Sergeant) (Production individual) Day (Sergeant) (Production individual) Delalande, François (Production individual) Dell (Sergeant) (Production individual) Downard (T/Sergeant) (Production individual) Graham, R (Production individual) Guthals (Sergeant) (Production individual) Hershey (Sergeant) (Production individual) Lambert (Staff Sergeant) (Production individual) Madru, Gaston (Production individual) Méjat, Georges (Production individual) Owens, Fred (Production individual) Priestley, Thomas A (Production individual) Statt, A (Production individual) Tizer, (T/5) (Production individual) Urban, (T/5) (Production individual) Bykov, N (Production individual) Karmen, R (Production individual) Kutubadze, K (Production individual) Osharkov, H (Production individual) Schutland, R (Production individual) Sofin, A (Production individual) Vorontsov, A (Production individual)
  • Personalities, Units and Organisations:
  • Keywords: Holocaust (theme) German Home Front 1939-1945 (theme) German Army 1939-1945 (theme) British Army 1939-1945 (theme) Nazi Europe (theme) United States Army 1939-1945 (theme) Soviet Army 1945-1991 (theme)
  • Physical Characteristics: Colour format: B&W Sound format: Sound (part silent) Soundtrack language: German Title language: English Subtitle language: None
  • Technical Details: Format: 35mm Number of items/reels/tapes: 5 Footage: 5192 ft; Running time: 56 mins
  • HD Media:
  • Link to IWM Collections page:

    A70 515

  • Related IWM Collections Objects:

    MGH 2626 (CHANNEL 4 NEWS ITEM ON HITCHCOCK'S CONCENTRATION CAMP FILM [Allocated Title]) MGH 4520 (A PAINFUL REMINDER [Main Title]) MGH 3320A (MEMORY OF THE CAMPS [Main Title]) A70 514-86 (SCENES AT GARDELEGEN CONCENTRATION CAMP, BUCHENWALD CONCENTRATION CAMP, AMPFING AND NUREMBERG, GERMANY [Allocated Title])
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