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Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps

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Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps Michalczyk, John J. "Post-Nuremberg." Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 123–144. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http:// dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474210652.ch-007>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 16:04 UTC. Copyright © John J. Michalczyk 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 7 Post-Nuremberg Leni Riefenstahl, whose Triumph of the Will mesmerized viewers with the glory and splendor of the National Socialist Party at its release in 1935, eventually saw the fi lm used against the Nazi defendants at the International Military Tribunal in Nuremberg in 1945. Her fi lm became an integral part of wartime documentaries such as Frank Capra’s Prelude to War and George Stevens’ Th e Nazi Plan . In the post- war years, Riefenstahl found herself participating in four denazifi cation proceedings. 1 As part of the process, the Allies at the Salzburg prison forced her to look at photographs of Nazi atrocities at Dachau, Auschwitz, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen, just as the prosecutors at the Nuremberg Tribunal forced the defendants to view the several documentaries with their grisly images. 2 In the end, Riefenstahl was labeled “fellow traveler” ( Mitläufer ), one of the fi ve categories into which suspects of Nazi Party affi liation were placed. She was part of a larger Allied plan for denazifi cation, initiated at Yalta and reaffi rmed at Potsdam, to rid Germany of the specter of Nazism. 3 Besides the democraticization goal, the denazifi cation plan included the re- education of the German people, with the Americans fi rst emphasizing the notion of collective guilt of all German citizens who allowed the tragedy of the concentration camps to exist. Th e Germans had willingly chosen Hitler as their leader and also acquiesced in his plans to rebuild Germany at the cost of millions of lives. 4 Th ey were not as unaware of what transpired as they claimed, sharing the responsibility of the evil that unfolded in the Th ird Reich’s rise to power. Susan L. Carruthers comments on the West’s perspective about Germans’ knowledge of Nazi atrocities: Th e salient point is, rather, that Anglo-American re- educators began with a presumption that Germans were neither as ignorant nor as innocent of Nazi atrocities as they oft en insisted. Implicity, liberal re- educators rejected a racial essentialism that took Germans to be irredeemably bad by virtue of malign Teutonic blood, but equally they refused to regard the German population as innocent dupes, either coerced or mesmerized by the apparatus of fascism. 5 123 124 Filming the End of the Holocaust To support the notion that the Germans, due to their blind allegiance to Hitler and the Th ird Reich government could not be trusted, the US government produced a variety of its own “educational” fi lms. Th e US Signal Corps under the supervision of Frank Capra (uncredited), produced a short ten- and-a- half- minute War Department Orientation fi lm entitled Your Job in Germany (1945). 6 Written by Th eoder Geisel (“Dr. Seuss”), the text is a virulent, anti-German diatribe stereotyping all Germans as a potentially dangerous threat. Directed toward US soldiers about to participate in the occupation of Germany, the short documentary opens with the strains of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (“Ode to Joy” segment) in the background as “War with Germany ends in victory” fl ashes on the screen. Th e traditional Liberty Bell tolling is Capra’s usual signature to the open or close of episodes of the “Why We Fight” series. Th e main title appears as the authoritative voice of the narrator announces, “Th e problem now is YOUR JOB IN GERMANY.” As heard in Capra’s Prelude to War fi lm of the series, there is overall a clichéd view presented of Germany as a war- mongering and aggressive nation. Th e narrator then introduces a cautionary note to the soldier viewing the fi lm: “You are still in enemy country. You are up against German history. It isn’t good.” Th e images of the various wars with Bismarck, von Hindenberg, and fi nally Hitler, dramatically reveal the country’s militaristic fever: “Th e German lust for conquest is not dead . it is merely gone undercover.” Th e fi lm alerts the American soldier therefore to suspect every German, but most dangerous is the youth, for they have grown up only knowing Nazi propaganda. So the occupying soldier must be vigilant, always suspicious and never fraternize with any German, lest he is caught off guard. Th e fi lm concludes darkly: “Someday the Germans might be cured of their disease, the super race disease, the world conquest disease. But they must be cured beyond the shadow of a doubt if they are ever allowed to take their place among respectable nations. Until that time, we stand guard!” Th e US government policy thus appeared to be one that still considered Germany a hostile nation, and one whose militarist spirit had to be broken. Th ere seems to be no reconciliatory message or hope of creating a democracy in the tone of the documentary. Th is position of accusing the Germans of collective guilt, however, would change gradually as the West needed the support of the Germans during the Cold War era. To modify any tendency to justify the Nazi Party’s actions from 1933 to 1945, fi lm further became a most pragmatic medium for German re- education on location. Th e victors, taking the moral high ground despite their own culpability in the bombings of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, became the Post-Nuremberg 125 teachers while the defeated enemy took on the role of unwilling but obligatory students. 7 Th rough exposure to atrocity fi lms and images of the defeat of the German Army, the citizens were to be rendered docile, free of their stereotypical image of a militaristic people. For the German armed services, there was a diff erent modus operandi : Where German POWs were concerned, re- education staff regarded fi lm as a vehicle to impress the captive audience not only with the nature of Nazism but the brute fact of Germany’s collapse. Th ey looked to fi lm to dramatise the meaning of defeat, hoping that scenes of Germans forced by British and American troops to confront piles of corpses and skeletal survivors in the camps would animate prisoners’ awareness of their own subalternity. 8 Carruthers rightfully observes, “Film, then, was to be an instrument of pacifi cation.” 9 In the wake of Germany’s defeat, underscoring the US policies of re- education the US War Department pledged to show the German people what their leaders had done and how they were complicit in their deeds. 10 Th e Allied- produced newsreel, Welt im Film, No. 5 , had already been shown in German theaters in June 1945 to off er a brief glimpse of the camps, but the twenty- minute documentary Death Mills ( Die Todesmühlen ) furnished a wider gamut of concentration camp images during their liberation in 1945. In January 1946, offi cials in the American Zone in Germany screened Death Mills using excerpts of Allied footage, especially from the fi lm shot by the US Signal Corps in the liberation of the concentration camps. A German soundtrack accompanied the images. Czech- born Hanuš Burger wrote and directed the German version with Billy Wilder overseeing the editing process. Wilder had arrived in Bad Homburg, north of Frankfurt, a day aft er V-E Day, on May 9, 1945, as part of the fi lm unit of the Psychological Warfare Division with the rank of colonel. Burger, collaborating with Wilder, soon aft er sent his version of the fi lm to the Psychological Warfare Division in England, but British documentary fi lmmaker Igor Montagu who was supervising the overall fi lm production believed the eighty- six-minute fi lm too long. It was shipped back to Germany where Wilder assumed the responsibility of directing the English- language version. He took Burger’s fi lm and shortened it, creating a type of microcosm of the concentration camps, yet staying faithful to the message of Nazi atrocity. 11 126 Filming the End of the Holocaust Death Mills Th e documentary begins with a note: “Th is fi lm will not be shown to the general public without permission of the War Department.” 12 Th e next title card reads: “Th is is a translation of a fi lm called Death Mills which our State Department is showing to the German people. It is a reminder that behind the curtain of Nazi pageants and parades, millions of men, women, and children were tortured to death—the worst mass murder in human history.” In a raspy voice, the male narrator describes in English the march of 1,100 German citizens carrying crosses to Gardelegen where they will bury the 1,100 victims of the Nazis incinerated in a barn outside the town. Th ese were part of the 20 million murdered by the Nazis, he recounts, equivalent to the citizens of twenty- two American states. 13 Th ese victims were products of the 300 Nazi concentration camps in Germany and occupied territories. 14 “Death mills ground out their dead until the Allied armies opened the gates.” Th ose who were incarcerated came from various religions and political beliefs, all considered by Hitler as anti-Nazi.
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