Did you know..? Alfred Hitchcock made a film about Nazi death camps?But according to this UK INDEPENDENT article, Alfred Hitchcock, the master of macabre, was so haunted and disturbed by actual footage of the Holocaust that he stayed away from the Pinewood Studios for a full week after seeing it..
And now, soon, we will all get to see the horrifying footage that haunted Hitchcock.. The INDEPENDENT reports:
In 1945, Hithcock had been enlisted by his friend and patron Sidney Bernstein to help with a documentary on German wartime atrocities, based on the footage of the camps shot by British and Soviet film units. In the event, that documentary was never seen.
“It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British,” suggests Dr Toby Haggith, Senior Curator at the Department of Research, Imperial War Museum. “Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there.”
The film took far longer to make than had originally been envisaged. By late 1945, the need for it began to wane. The Allied military government decided that rubbing the Germans’ noses in their own guilt wouldn’t help with postwar reconstruction.
Five of the film’s six reels were eventually deposited in the Imperial War Museum and the project was quietly forgotten.
In the 1980s, the footage was discovered in a rusty can in the museum by an American researcher. It was eventually shown in an incomplete version at the Berlin Film Festival in 1984 and then broadcast on American PBS in 1985 under the title Memory of the Camps but in poor quality and without the missing sixth reel. The original narration, thought to have been written by future Labour Cabinet Minister Richard Crossman in collaboration with Australian journalist Colin Wills, was read by actor Trevor Howard.
The Imperial War museum has now put together the real footage along with other material and have prepared the film to be seen in the same way that Hitchcock did.. it will be shown on British TV in 2015 when the world marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Europe—the film will then be seen at other theaters and film festivals..
