A documentary film showing the most notorious Nazi concentration camps as they appeared when they were liberated by Allied forces in 1945, went unfinished and was abandoned by U.S. and British authorities, apparently for political reasons immediately after the war, a British film researcher says.
The incomplete documentary was screened for the first time at the International Film Festival in West Berlin today under the title “The Memory of the Camps. “It aroused particular interest because the late Alfred Hitchcock is credited as one of its directors.
Information about the making of the documentary and its abandonment was provided by its co-editor, Peter Tanner and others interviewed by Kay Gladstone, film researcher at the Imperial War Museum in London who attended the screening. Gladstone said that the original intention, in the spring of 1945, was to produce an hour-long documentary of the atrocities committed at the camps, then freshly discovered, to show to the German civilian population.
But by the autumn of the same year, according to Germans who recall the situation, the Allies decided it was no longer appropriate to show the compilation of atrocity material to Germans. The Americans and British were said to have decided this because of political considerations of the future role of Germany.
Hitchcock, who was by then famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a film-maker, acted only as a treatment advisor for the producers of the documentary, Gladstone said. He arrived in London after all of the footage was made and left about two months before the project was dropped. But his name appears with that of C. Wills and others as directors of the film.
Gladstone was told by Tanner that at one of his meetings with Hitchcock, the British-born American film director made a point of saying the horrors shown in the documentary would be disbelieved by the public. Hitchcock insisted therefore that every endeavor must be made in the editing not to resort to trickery which would give the impression that the film was contrived or faked.
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