German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

Overview

On September 29, 1945, a raw, unfinished cut of a harrowing documentary on Nazi concentration camps was screened at the Ministry of Information in London. For five months, Sidney Bernstein had guided a small crew—Stewart McAllister, Richard Crossman, and Alfred Hitchcock—through hours of brutal footage. Their goal: a feature-length indictment of Nazi atrocities, designed to force Germans to confront their complicity and accept Allied occupation. But the timing had passed. Even incomplete, the film stunned viewers into silence. Now, fully restored to six reels by the IWM, it rivals Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955).