Memory of the Camps

After being shelved by the British Government in 1945 and following a decades-long residency at Britain’s Imperial War Museum, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, a feature-length documentary film commissioned by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF) and produced by the late filmmaker Sidney Bernstein, will have its first theatrical run in North America beginning January 6, 2017 in New York. This lost masterpiece of British documentary film was intended to definitively refute potential denials of the extent of the brutality in Nazi death camps. With the input of Alfred Hitchcock, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey consists of six reels of footage shot in 1945 as Allied troops liberated Nazi-occupied Europe. Restored by the Imperial War Museum, the film provides shocking, uncensored images of the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Intended to be shown to German prisoners of war in Germany after the fall of the Third Reich, production on German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was halted due to a change in the British government’s post-war priorities. An unfinished cut of the film was screened on September 29, 1945, but the British government actively suppressed it from that point on. The film was not completed and released in full until seven decades later in 2014 at the Berlin International Film Festival.uni