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The most important movie Alfred Hitchcock ever worked on didn't make it to the screen.
Two women drag an emaciated female corpse along the ground, its head bouncing on the dirt. When they reach a large pit, they stop, give the naked body a quick tug backward to pick up momentum, then hurl it into the hole. The corpse, which looks like a skeleton covered in a thin film of skin, flops onto a mound of decomposing bodies.
The scene, shot at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of World War II, might never have been seen by the public had a decommissioned film, boasting Alfred Hitchcock as a supervising director and British film pioneer Sidney Bernstein as producer, not been resurrected. Authorized in the spring of 1945 by the Allied forces, German Concentration Camps Factual Survey captured the monstrous realities found during the liberation of Nazi death camps, including Bergen-Belsen, Dachau and Auschwitz.
Yet by August of that year, the film was shelved by British authorities. Everything--reels of footage, the script, the cameramen's notes--was boxed up and buried in the archives of the Imperial War Museums (IWM) in London. A new HBO documentary, Night Will Fall (January 26), directed by André Singer and narrated by Helena Bonham Carter and Jasper Britton, tells the story of how, 70 years later, this lost film came back to life.
In the spring of 1945, British, American and Soviet troops were headed toward Berlin in the final days of the war. Along with them were soldiers who'd been trained as cameramen--young, brawny men with cigarettes hanging out of their mouths and large, boxy cameras hoisted up on their shoulders, who arrived at concentration camps during their liberation to record the harrowing aftermath of the atrocities there.
It took a while for details about the concentration camps to get out. On April 19, 1945, BBC Radio aired a controversial report by Richard Dimbleby about his experience at Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany. Initially, the BBC refused to air the report; the broadcaster simply couldn't believe Dimbleby hadn't embellished the details. "I...