NIGHT WILL FALL, a documentary by Andre Singer (Exe Producer THE ACT OF KILLING), tells the powerful and moving story of the discovery of German Concentration camps by Allied and Russian film crews at the end of WW2, and an unfinished documentary. But of course it is much, much more than that.

In truth there are two films here. The first is a film about a film; the attempts of Sidney Bernstein, working for the War Office’s Ministry of Information, to get his film called “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” made. The second is the story of the utter horror and dehumanisation of the holocaust.

It is not the film’s fault that the latter utterly dominates the former for at least the first third of the film, as you are confronted with footage from the ‘liberation’ of Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald camps that can only be described by an eye witness as, “looking inside hell”. They are not wrong. Twisted, broken, emaciated, eviscerated rotting bodies are everywhere. Camera crews film as allied and forced SS soldiers pick up semi decomposed corpses and fling them unceremoniously into pits, piled high like so many rag dolls. In the background a body twitches and you realise they are still alive.

… relentless, barbaric and utterly alien …

We move on to Russian footage from Auschwitz, and a heart-breaking mountain of discarded children’s toys. Of glasses, teeth and hair which attest to the unimaginable number of executions; to stories and more footage of experimentation on children (by Josef Mengele). In the death camp of Buchenwald, bodies twitch and writhe, barely human in appearance. In the huts, dead bodies lie atop one another, and sometimes “one would suddenly reach out a hand”. It is relentless, barbaric and utterly alien.

Although the horror of this footage is, rightly, never far away in this film, it is maybe thankful that after a while the central narrative of the film starts to refocus, in the viewer’s mind. What emerges is the story of one of the most important documentaries never finished. It is the story of Sidney Bernstein and his collaborators (including Alfred Hitchcock) attempting to pull together a film to show the world the horror of the concentration camps. As Sidney says in the film, if we did not do it, people would just deny it; “and I guessed correctly”. Why was the film not finished? It took too long and missed its moment.

It is April 1945. Military film crews are documenting the atrocities, as are the advancing allied troops. The result is thousands of reels of filmed footage. The war effort needs a film quickly (perhaps a month?). They want to confront the Germans with the undeniable truth of the camps. As more and more camps are liberated and filmed, rivalries begin to emerge. Two films get made. The Americans get Billy Wilder (himself an exiled Jew from Austria) to make a half hour feature – quickly. It gets shown. The word is out and the Germans have seen it.

For the war office, the urgency of the film has gone. As the politics of international co-operation begins to exert itself in the chaos at the end of the war, reconstruction and what to do with thousands of stateless Jews now becomes the name of the game. The displaced do not want to go back home to Austria or Poland, but rather to the US, Britain or Palestine. No one wants them, and no one wants a film that may give sympathy to a call for British or US citizenship (which, ultimately, became one of the motivating factors behind the creation of the state of Israel itself). This is why the film is not finished. But for all that, a foreign office memo that talks of putting the project on hold for a while, has an underlying subtext of saying “give it nine months and you can make your movie for history, for posterity …” but they never did, although the footage is used at Nuremberg and provides crucial, indisputable evidence.

It is against this backdrop that we discover the work by the Imperial War Museum to complete the film, under the direction of Dr Toby Haggith. They had a ‘rough’ cut, with five reels of the film already made by Sydney and his team. No sound (sound was not routinely recorded in documentary film making until the 1960s) and they are missing the sixth reel. Using the original script and sifting through thousands of hours of footage they finally complete Bernstein’s film. They changed very little: only where they felt the original filmmakers, for continuity’s sake, would have. For the twins’ scene they used different footage from the original, the head shots and the photo album at the end were re-matched and some sound was added – that was about it.

NIGHT WILL FALL is a remarkable film about an incredibly complex and difficult subject. Andre Singer and his research team tell a powerful story. When watching the footage you are initially overwhelmed but then you start to look at the reactions of the living, the soldiers, the film crews, the inmates, the German Soldiers and especially those of the German civilians brought in to see what had been happening on their doorstep. You begin to wonder who all these people are. There is much talk of the smell which the camera crews could not catch, “the stench of death was everywhere”, eyewitness’s recount on daily log sheets (called ‘dope’ sheets) and of the constant sound of moaning.

with the 70th anniversary of the liberation looming, this is the last opportunity to speak to those who were there…

It is also worth mentioning that because the footage shot by the Russian film crews at Auschwitz and other camps was staged (as they got there days if not weeks after liberation), historians have tended to dismiss it as fake – but that is unfair. It does not have the immediacy of the British Bergen-Belsen footage, but they do have the foresight to show the piles of clothes, teeth and hair; of warehouses full of possessions; and of the furnaces – all of which allow the viewer to only imagine at the scale of the atrocity done here. At one point the narrator asks us to imagine how long it would take to create the pile of glasses we see before us if only one in ten people wear glasses, and one’s mind races, as we see a literal mountain of spectacles.

Best of all, though, has to be the interviews with those who were there: inmates, soldiers, film crew and even a Nuremberg lawyer. It is their testimony that links us directly to the past. It is living history. One sees a young woman’s face through the barbed wire fence, emaciated and drawn, and we cut to the talking head we have been listening to, and we realise that they are the same person. It is profound. The film’s researchers have done an amazing job in finding those still living voices and bringing them together with the original footage. It would, however, have been good to have had some German eyewitness feedback – but apparently the researchers could not find anyone to do so.

Some of the interviews are taken from a 1985 documentary about the unfinished film, which serves as a reminder that as these events move into history they must not be forgotten; and with the 70th anniversary of the liberation of these camps looming, this is the last opportunity to speak directly to those who were there. This film is not voyeuristic but factual and truthful. The pain of all those who experienced it is still all too palpable today. But what is undoubtedly the saddest thing is that the message from this film and from history is that we must not forget and that we must not let it happen again. Yet in the intervening years it has never stopped. Not just war, but genocide. Even in Europe. Yet worse still, in an age of social media, Facebook and Instagram, it is still happening. Anyone who sees NIGHT WILL FALL will leave with a heavy heart but also a spring in their step, vowing to make a change for the better.

Look out for an interview with Andre Singer coming soon on this site.

httpvh://youtu.be/lbB9NCYzQVU