German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
Written byRichard Crossman
Colin Wills
Produced bySidney Bernstein
Narrated byJasper Britton
Edited byGeorge Smith
Stewart McAllister
Peter Tanner
Marcel Cohen[1]
Production
companies
Distributed byBritish Film Institute
Imperial War Museum
Running time
75 minutes[2]
CountryUnited Kingdom

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, based on footage shot by the Allied forces in 1945.[3]

The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information,[4] with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a "treatment advisor".[1][5][6][7] The script was written by Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was production supervisor.[1]

The project was abandoned in September 1945, and the film was left unfinished for nearly seventy years. The film's restoration was completed by film scholars at the Imperial War Museum. The finished film had its world premiere early in 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival,[8] and was shown in a limited number of venues in 2015.[9] It was released in North America in 2017.[2]

The British government shelved the film without showing it to the public, and questions have been raised about the extent to which political considerations, such as British concern about Zionism or changes in German occupation policy, may have played in the film being withheld.[5][10]

  1. ^ a b c "Production Credits, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey (1945)" (PDF). Retrieved 29 April 2015.
  2. ^ a b Cite error: The named reference Dargis-review was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  3. ^ "About the film: German Concentration Camp Factual Survey". Imperial War Museum. Archived from the original on 1 March 2017. Retrieved 17 October 2016.
  4. ^ Jeffries, Stuart (9 January 2015). "The Holocaust film that was too shocking to show". The Guardian. Retrieved 1 February 2015.
  5. ^ a b Peter Bradshaw (18 September 2014). "Night Will Fall review – unflinching footage reveals true hell of the Holocaust". The Guardian.
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference berlinale was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ Cite error: The named reference Holocaust and moving image was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  8. ^ Cite error: The named reference Hollywood Reporter 2-14 was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  9. ^ Cite error: The named reference Times-Night Will Fall review was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  10. ^ Cite error: The named reference PBS - Memory of Camps - FAQ was invoked but never defined (see the help page).