"But who bears the real responsibility? You, who allowed your leader to carry out this horrible madness. You, who couldn't do enough for this degenerate triumph. You, who were a part of this camp..."
So says a British officer in German through a loudspeaker to the captured management of the just-liberated Belsen camp, probably on 24 April 1945. We are twenty-one minutes into this one-hour film, twenty-one minutes so far of unremitting close-ups and, necessarily, wide shots of the thousands of naked, freshly-dead, sunken-eyed sixty-pound corpses that the heavy uniformed men and women who had ruled the camp until hours before are being forced to heave onto mounds on truck beds, then unload and heave into freshly-bulldozed pits.
"Do not imagine this was the only black spot that was uncovered in Germany. There were over three hundred others. No German can say he did not know about them..."
(cont.)
The film is incomplete. The British began assembling it in 1945, with Alfred Hitchcock editing some parts, and with brief American participation until we instead had Billy Wilder make his own film. There are long gaps in the narration -- itself known only from a partial script read forty years later by Trevor Howard when PBS first reconstructed the film in 1985 -- but the silences are appropriately accusatory. The final reel, shot by Russians, is missing.
But the final narration is not.
"Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves, to bury the dead, to file past the victims. This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933..."
"Memory of the Camps" will be available online Thursday at noon.
This is the best I can come up with in terms of a TV schedule.