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"A time capsule as much as a direct historical document, showing not only what the Allied Forces found when they first arrived at the Nazi concentration camps but also how the British government of the time thought it was appropriate to communicate the Nazi atrocities." – Hollywood Reporter
In 1944 and ‘45, cameramen with the Allied troops documented the horrors discovered as Europe was liberated from the Nazis. The footage was assembled for a documentary by a brilliant team that included editor Stewart McAllister, Alfred Hitchcock and Australian writer Colin Wills. But the film was difficult, progress slow and it missed its moment. By the autumn, British priorities for Germany had evolved from de-Nazification to reconstruction, and so the film was shelved, unfinished.
Nearly seven decades on, the documentary has been completed, the picture restored and the narration recorded exactly as it was written in 1945, its factual inaccuracies and political biases intact. German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is an extraordinary cultural artefact depicting the Holocaust through a 1945 lens.