German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

In 1945, British forces approach Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Producer Sidney Bernstein working for the Ministry of Information, leads a film crew to document the German atrocities. The project is called German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. He would recruit his friend Alfred Hitchcock to help create the film, but it gets suspended in the murky cold-war politics after the fighting. The footage was used in Death Mills (1945) and Memory of the Camps (1984). Eventually, the Imperial War Museum decided to expand on the 1984 version to complete the original plan for the movie.

This is an important project. It's important to keep revisiting it over the years. More than this film alone, it's more important to maintain and preserve the endless hours of unused footage. This is the video evidence of the actual truth. From the first rumors of the camps, the deniers were out ready to dispute them. Without the original film stock, they would have a lot more ammunition. As long as the physical evidence exists, the deniers are relegated to the fringe.

This must be shown at every schools.There is a trend among new generation worshipping hitler without knowing actual history.Such cruel personalities must be hated

70 years on and not a day goes past that I do not give a thought for the horror and sheer misery the individuals ripped from their lives and thrown into the hell that was the concentration camps. How did this happen? The images shown in this documentary should be shown to every child in every school across the globe. This way something like this might never happen again. Sadly I feel that this is nothing short of a pipe dream as we humans have a tenancy to forget history to attempt to make new history which inevitably makes the past look like child's play. For all humans sake inhumane treatment of our fellow man should never be this barbaric ever again. My thoughts are that the quote that by gods grace we will learn is nothing more than lip service as a species domination is all some want and strive for. Those of us who strive for peace and fairness for all need to always aware for the next maniacal leader capable of such horror and end their reign before it gets started.

This is a truly outstanding film. What it achieves is a true glimpse of the horror of man's inhumanity to man. We cannot truly understand the full extent of the evils perpetrated by the Nazi war machine, totally devoid of a speck of human compassion, and what went on day by day over years of the most vile persecution. This documentary tells us what the filmmakers found when they went to Belsen, Dachau etc. This glimpse in itself is mind numbing. What must it have been like to live through it? We can only imagine. The tortured souls in this film look like they were in "hell on earth". In fact, I would never have imagined hell being this brutalizing. The emaciated bodies, sunken eyes, glazed looks of men, women and children staggering around speaks for itself. This must never happen again. Yet, we know that unimaginable brutality still goes on around the world today. Maybe not as organized and efficient as the war machine in this film but the twisted and hateful minds of human beings is still at work in this world. This film needs to be shown. Some would object to the graphic pictures on the screen but this is what the Allied forces found when the arrived. Modern film makers could never reproduce evil on this scale. This is not a spoiler because most of us know what happened. What we need is a reminder of how false prophets can lead a people to such atrocities. The opening scenes show huge crowds cheering on Hitler and his party. This led 12 years later to the abominations that were suffered by Jews, clergy, dissidents, homosexuals and others not deemed to fit the plan a master race. Excellent film. We should all watch it.

I hope we can be better people because of this film, but I fear that as time goes on, the impact of these atrocities fade. It's important to remind ourselves how not to be.