Culture Warning: Who Will Protect Our History, Original Works - August 25, 2019

Within days of Bergen-Belsen’s April 1945 liberation, the British government knew it had to act. History had to be preserved lest it be disbelieved. 

A team of documentary filmmakers led by Sidney Bernstein and advised by Alfred Hitchcock and Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was assembled to capture the horrors of what was left behind at a single Nazi death camp — 13,000 yet-to-be-disposed-of corpses and around 60,000 living skeletons. 

The “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” later included post-liberation footage of the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps in Poland, but for largely political reasons it never saw the light of day — not to the public. It wasn’t until the 2014 release of “Night Will Fall,” a documentary by Andre Singer on the 1945 effort, that the first raw footage from Bergen-Belsen and other camps was semi-widely viewed. 

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