Related Link “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” (movie website)

A very important movie about the Holocaust made its way to New York City for the first time this week at the end of a tortuous journey that began 70 years ago when Allied forces and newsreel cameramen stumbled into Nazi concentration camps. Called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey,” it is as unadorned as its title, a document shot in the moment to capture forever evidence of the unimaginable.

Made under the auspices of the British Ministry of Information, produced by Sidney Bernstein, the founder of Granada Television, assembled with advice from Alfred Hitchcock, the movie was meant to ram home to Germans what had been done in their name in the land of Goethe and Hölderlin.

Instead, after a rough cut of five of its planned six reels was shown at the Ministry on Sept. 29, 1945, it was buried for decades in the archives of Britain’s Imperial War Museum. Only recently was “Factual Survey” restored, digitized and completed by the museum’s staff with the incorporation of the sixth reel.