Nazi Concentration Camps
About Nazi Concentration Camps
The hour-long compilation shows twelve camps as Allied units entered them: Leipzig, Penig, Ohrdruf, Hadamar, Breendonk, Hannover, Arnstadt, Nordhausen, Mauthausen, Buchenwald, Dachau, and Belsen. Military cameramen filmed the dead, survivors, crematoria, mass graves, and objects kept as exhibits, including lampshades of human skin. SS men are put to burying bodies and helping the living. A bulldozer pushes corpses into a grave at one camp. Prosecutors played the six reels in the Nuremberg courtroom on 29 November 1945. The same film was used again at the Adolf Eichmann trial in 1961.
Cast & crew
More about Nazi Concentration Camps
George Stevens organized the U.S. Army Special Coverage Unit, about forty-five people, nicknamed the Stevens Irregulars, after Eisenhower asked in 1944 for a camera team. A SHAEF memo of 25 April 1945 told Signal Corps cameramen to film the camps in full for the Judge Advocate General’s war-crimes commission. John Ford is credited as producer of the compilation. Editors cut about 6,000 feet from some 80,000 feet shot by American and British crews.
Themes
Background
Prosecutors screened it on 29 November 1945 at the trial of Hermann Göring and the other major defendants in Nuremberg. It was shown again in Jerusalem in 1961, at Eichmann’s trial.
Making
Stevens’s unit had been formed to cover the advance, not to supply a courtroom. The April 1945 SHAEF note is what turned the camp negatives toward the Judge Advocate General.
Look
Army and British military cameramen shot the camps on the orders in the 25 April 1945 SHAEF memo. Stevens’s Special Coverage Unit was the American group Eisenhower had asked him to form.
Preservation
The courtroom film is about 6,000 feet, six reels, drawn from a much larger Allied negative. Prints remain in circulation, including an Internet Archive copy.
Notes
- Also titled Nazi Concentration and Prison Camps.
- The six reels were entered as trial evidence. The images shocked defendants and judges, and the court adjourned.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, George S. Patton, and Omar Bradley appear in the footage.
- Camps sit in Germany, Austria, and Belgium. Breendonk is the Belgian fort.
- Survivors on camera include Russian, Czechoslovak, Polish, French, Hungarian, Belgian, and German prisoners, among them political prisoners and Jews.
- A British officer describes conditions at one camp. SS troops are filmed burying the dead.
Scenes
- Bodies and living prisoners in the same yards at the newly entered camps.
- Ovens, bone ash, and a grill piled with corpses.
- Lampshades of human skin and two shrunken heads laid out as exhibits.
- A bulldozer pushes bodies into a mass grave.
- SS men bury the dead under Allied guard.
Also available
- Internet Archive (nazi_concentration_camps)
- Wikimedia Commons (Nazi Concentration Camps.webm)
