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Storyline
In 1945, camera crews went with the American and British armies in the nazis death camps and filmed the horror they found there. A group of directors among whom was Alfred Hichcock developed a script to present these horrors and be sure that people remember. Forty-eight years later it came out from the cave of the Imperial War Museum and was edited as forecast. Written by
Jean-Marie Berthiaume <jiembe@videotron.ca>
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Trivia
This film was planned to be six reels, but the sixth reel - made by Soviet cinematographers filming the liberation of concentration camps near the Russian front - was taken back to the USSR in 1945 and not included in the 1985 release.
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Quotes
Narrator:
Auschwitz. The most up-to-date institution was better equipped for killing. Transports of prisoners from all over occupied Europe were went for extermination in one of the special Vernichtungslager. Here, 4 million people were murdered. As many men, women, and children as you could pack into a great city.
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This was recently aired on "Frontline", presumably reconstructed, although I don't know how it differs from the version already available in region 2. Trevor Howard's narration lends a straightforward narration minus any attempt to color it with gravity. There is no music score to let us know that what we are seeing is monumental tragedy. Neither embellishment is needed and would probably be disrespectful to the victims of what we are witnessing through the lenses of Allied cameramen as they documented the horrors of the death camps in Germany. The endless shots of the faces of dead men, women and children, the piles of naked corpses thrown haphazardly upon one another in mass graves of 5000 each, and all in one of many camps...it was overwhelming to realize how many hopes and dreams--how many lives--were snuffed out in such a short time, to end up nameless under a mound of earth. The passage of 60 years, and the litany of mass murders that have occurred since fail to diminish the shock and horror of these images, rarely visible on such a massive scale to those of us who weren't there. How can any holocaust-denier look at this film and still maintain their delusion?