horror in our time: images of the concentration camps in the british media, 1945
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This article was downloaded by: [University North Carolina - Chapel Hill]On: 18 November 2014, At: 06:56Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,London W1T 3JH, UK
Historical Journal of Film,Radio and TelevisionPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/chjf20
Horror in Our Time: Imagesof the concentration campsin the British media, 1945Hannah CavenPublished online: 02 Aug 2010.
To cite this article: Hannah Caven (2001) Horror in Our Time: Images of theconcentration camps in the British media, 1945, Historical Journal of Film, Radioand Television, 21:3, 205-253
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01439680120069399
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Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 21, No. 3, 2001
Horror in Our Time: images of theconcentration camps in the British media, 1945
HANNAH CAVEN, London
There are certain images which are instantly recognisable and immediately associatedwith a particular event or period in history. The images which de� ne the concentrationcamps and the Holocaust are a signi� cant and profound example of this phenomenon.Piles of emaciated, naked corpses unceremoniously stacked up in � lthy yards, skeletalmen and women staring blankly at the camera and, perhaps most dramatically, a singleshocking image of a bulldozer pushing a pile of corpses into an open mass grave.All these images have been etched into the memories of those who read thepapers or watched the newsreels in Britain in the summer of 1945 and subsequentgenerations still vividly remember the � rst time they encountered these harrowingimages.
What is less well known and less well recognised is where the majority of these imagescame from. Rarely does the public question who took these pictures, whether therewere more that were censored or even perhaps why these pictures were taken. In an erawhen the public generally has become inured to the sight of horror on our televisionscreens and on the front pages of our newspapers, it is easy to forget the impact thatthese images had on the unsuspecting public that saw them for the very � rst time andthe subsequent answers that they must have demanded.
When one actually stops to look back at the pictures which � rst appeared in theBritish press it also becomes clear that there has been an ironic re-shaping of the story.A huge number of the images which most closely de� ne the Holocaust in popularimages today originated from a relatively small camp in Germany called Bergen–Belsen.In contrast, the names most closely associated with the Holocaust today are those ofother camps, particularly the death camp at Auschwitz, but also the easily accessiblecamps at Dachau and Buchenwald, while Bergen–Belsen is a largely forgotten entity.
Bergen–Belsen (more commonly known simply as Belsen) commands a unique placein the story of the concentration camps, as it emerged for the British public. Belsen isunique in that a pictorial record of the camp exists from the moment it was liberatedby the British army, to the moment it was razed to the ground. But this footage raisesquestions in itself. Who took it? Why, and for what reason? It also raises the questionof why it is so exclusive and why there is no other similar record of the otherconcentration camps.
This article looks back to the men of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit(AFPU), who took the majority of the still images and the moving footage of Belsen.It examines the way in which they recorded the images and their emotions andresponses as they did so. In this way it seeks to provide a background to the picturesand to the men who took them. It also looks at how the material was used once it
ISSN 0143-9685 print/ISSN 1465-3451 online/01/030205-48 Ó 2001 IAMHIST & Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/01439680120069399
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reached the British press and the signi� cant impact that this pictorial record had on theconsciousness of the British public[1].
The majority of the Belsen footage was taken by men serving in the British Army andyet at no point does a speci� c order appear to have been given or the work of thesespeci� c cameramen to have been of� cially sanctioned. However, on an individual level,each cameraman and soldier took a personal decision to record what they saw, and todo it with the clear intention that it should be recorded for posterity, and so that theBritish public who were largely ignorant of the true nature of these camps should knowof the horror and never forget.
The Army Film and Photographic Unit
By the spring of 1945, the war had swung decisively in the Allies’ favour. The victoriesof the Red Army in the East were paralleled by the territorial gains of the AlliedExpeditionary Force in the West following the D-Day landings. The situation changedrapidly, the advances were swift and the British army cameramen following the Alliedtroops were frequently unsure about where they were heading next.
From the beginning of the D-Day offensive the movements of the British troops hadbeen tracked by members of the Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU), which haddeveloped as a distinct unit working among the Allied forces during the war itself. In1939, the British cine cameraman Ian Grant recalled that photographic correspondentswere deployed by both established newspapers and newsreel companies:
Fleet Street soon got their priorities right and immediate consideration regard-ing picture coverage was soon organised by the photo editor of ‘The Times’newspaper … The newsreels were equally quick off the mark, and each senta cameraman …[2]
However, this deployment of professional photographic correspondents took placeduring the period of ‘phoney war’ before France was overwhelmed by the German‘Blitzkreig’ and the British frantically withdrew from Dunkirk. In the years thatfollowed, the AFPU became integrated into the British forces. As a result, when theAllied forces invaded mainland Europe, it was the AFPU rather than professionalmedia correspondents who were closest to the immediate action.
The AFPU was divided up into units. Number 1 unit was set up in Cairo to � lm theactivities of Montgomery (the British Commander) in the Western Desert of NorthAfrica, whilst No. 5 unit accompanied the troops back into Europe on D-Day. The unit� lming at the battle of EI Alamein, in North Africa, seems to have been indicative ofthe AFPU as a whole. The cameramen were involved in the action and consequentlysuffered many losses; according to Grant, ‘Proportionally no other unit suffered soheavily’,[3]. The inference is clear that these men were at the very forefront of theaction, and while acting primarily as cameramen recording the action, they were alsowell trained and effective soldiers. Ultimately they became known simply as ‘battlephotographers’.
These ‘battle photographers’ were formally trained at Pinewood studios in Englandand selected from a range of � ghting units. Some cameramen like Sergeant Bert Hardyand Captain Bill Malandine had already had a great deal of experience as photogra-phers for the British press; others had no professional experience, like Sergeant BillLawrie who joined the AFPU after a period of parachute training. Lawrie was then
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Horror in Our Time 207
trained as a photographer before being deployed to � lm the dropping of airbournetroops.
The early assignments of the AFPU are re� ected in an of� cial record from theImperial War Museum in London[4]:
One of the units of the AFPU is a group of four men with a driver, with aroving commission to go wherever there is action, wherever they think theycan get pictures of the recent campaign … Two of the men take still pictures,the other two use cine cameras. The group consists of Sergeant Len Chetwyn,formerly with Keystone; Sergeant John Herbert formerly with Kodak,Sergeant Jim Mapham, formerly with Leicester Mercury; Sergeant ChrisWindows, formerly with Paramount … they live the life of the ordinary soldierin the front line, with the same rations … Their weapons are cameras insteadof guns …
This description endorses the fact that this particular unit of the army, at least in theearly stages of its development, continued to draw heavily on the established journal-istic talents of the men it had at its disposal. However, they were also distinctly differentfrom the large numbers of war correspondents who reported directly to the differentnewspapers and newsreel companies. As the war continued the units became lessindependent and ‘roving’ and more directly attached to certain units of the army,although they could still move around between units and divisions. From the recordsof the cameramen in Belsen it appears that the practice of combining a stills photogra-pher with a cine cameraman was continued, with two or three such pairs workingtogether.
The AFPU footage taken at the decisive battle of EI Alamein was used in the � lmDesert Victory, which was generally well received by the British public who were given,it seemed, an extended view of the realities of modern warfare. However, it alsopresented problems which would be re� ected later in the coverage of the concentrationcamps. The night sequences used in the � lm were shot at Pinewood studios, as wasquickly noted by critical viewers. As Ian Grant notes, ‘… many, later � lm sequencesand stills pictures were studiously faked and passed off as the real thing[5]. This raisedthe question of authenticity, and while it may have been necessary to create an imagerepresentative of the full force of battle it was a dangerous precedent to set.
The staged cine material tended to lack authenticity and the idea of speci� callycomposed footage was a short-lived experiment. However, it does indicate why therewas the potential for scepticism about the material subsequently issued from theconcentration camps; especially as in the case of the camps it was not the immediacyof battle which was being recorded and it would theoretically have been possible to‘stage’ the footage. This appears to have been something that the cameramen them-selves took into consideration from the beginning of their � lming in Belsen.
It was a customary practice that whenever the AFPU took pictures or shot footage,the undeveloped � lms were sent back to England for processing. Accompanying the� lms were ‘dope sheets’. These sheets essentially provide a brief explanation of exactlywhat each picture, or sequence of pictures, on each roll of � lm contains, so that thepeople receiving the images in England knew exactly what the pictures contained beforethey passed them onto the different news agencies and the censor. In addition, thesheets also contained an introductory story, which summarised the context in which thefootage had been taken.
These dope sheets vary enormously, depending on the individual author. At times
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they are surprisingly personal documents, revealing something of what the cameramenwere thinking at the time and as they were preparing to send the footage home. Theysometimes contain the odd aside, or personal comment that elucidates their work, andwhich are missing from the edited ‘of� cial’ captions, under which the images were � led,or sold to the press.
The AFPU were among some of the � rst troops to enter the camp at Belsen and asmall unit remained there for several weeks. Among the AFPU unit stationed in Belsenwere Sergeants Mike Lewis, Bill Lawrie, Ernest Oakes and Captain Malandine. Thedope sheets written by these cameramen are the most extensive, and consequently alsoreveal the most about these men and the conditions that they were working in. Othercameramen and prominent British war correspondents, such as Bert Hardy of PicturePost, Ian Grant and Paul Wyand of Movietone News and Richard Dimbleby of theBBC, all passed through the camp and recorded their dispatches, but none of themremained for more than a few days. Of� cial British war artists like Leslie Cole depictedthe camp and the well-known British cartoonist ‘Giles’ made several fascinatingdrawings of Belsen. In contrast to the men of the AFPU, however, they all moved on,while the AFPU remained to record everything that took place in Belsen until it was� nally burnt to the ground, in May 1945.
The AFPU cameramen had already seen at � rst hand the horrors of modern warfare,but all of them expressed total shock at what they witnessed in Belsen. Viewing thesituation from the present, which has seen the establishment and acceptance of theHolocaust as a concept, it is much more dif� cult to appreciate the extent of the horrorwhich they had to absorb. These men had the additional dif� culty that they had toaccept and interpret this information in the context of a war, where they expected nosituation to remain static for long and where they were still in a position of personaldanger.
Ultimately it fell to this particular group of AFPU cameramen to try and make acoherent, comprehensible account of this incomprehensible manifestation of humansuffering, a role they had not really had to play before.
A Brief History of Belsen
Belsen, had not originally been intended as a death camp. It had been set up initiallyto hold Jews who the Nazis felt could be useful to them. In February 1943, Himmlerissued an order referring to ‘exchange’ Jews, essentially Jews who had in� uentialcontacts abroad who could be used either to put pressure on the Allies or in exchangefor Germans interned in other European countries.
The Reichsfuhrer-SS [Himmler] intends to establish in Germany a camp forabout 10,000 Jews … who on account of their foreign connections could beused to apply pressure to the Allies …[6]
This led to the creation of Belsen, which initially held about 1,500 Jews, who lived inrelatively decent conditions compared to those in other camps. Belsen retained thisrelatively privileged status until the end of 1943.
In the � rst six months of 1944 the situation began to change dramatically as the camppopulation leapt from 2000 to 7000[7] This was precipitated by a transport of DutchJews from Westerbork. Previously they would have been transported to Auschwitz inSouthern Poland, but the pressure imposed by the Red Army’s advance in the Eastmeant that they arrived instead at Belsen. This in� ux made conditions in the camp
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Horror in Our Time 209
much harder, but Belsen still retained a death rate slightly below that of other camps.A further and more dramatic transformation took place in 1944 with the designation ofBelsen as a ‘recovery’ camp where sick and exhausted prisoners could recuperate, anhorri� c anachronism in itself. Initially, because the camp was divided into at least threeseparate units, the disease-ridden prisoners did not infect the main part of the camp.
In December 1944, a further crucial decision was taken when Josef Kramer wasappointed as commandant[8] Kramer had a reputation for being a tough administrator,having been previously employed at Auschwitz. He took the immediate decision toestablish Belsen as a ‘proper’ concentration camp with the subsequent abolishment ofall previous ‘privileges’. This marked a very signi� cant change in the history of Belsenand the future fate of its prisoners.
At the beginning of 1945, as the war in the East continued in the Russians’ favour,the Eastern camps began to be evacuated. A combination of death marches and horri� cjourneys in open box-cars in the middle of winter led to a huge in� ux of prisoners toBelsen who were closer to death than life. The recorded death rates clearly demonstratethis: in 1944 the total death rate was 2048, in March 1945 alone, the death rate was18,168[9]. The inmate population rose dramatically to more than 40,000, inducingovercrowding on a scale previously unknown in the camp.
Figures compiled at the concentration camps of Buchenwald reveal that early in1945, a similar situation occurred there.
In the � rst three months of 1945 as many evacuees from other campsstreamed into Buchenwald as had been brought in during the whole of1943[10].
Signi� cantly this new in� ux of prisoners also meant that the majority of the prisonerswere now Jewish. Bridgman quotes an interesting statistic: in most camps at the timeof liberation, Jews comprised only about 10% of the inmate population. In Belsenabout 40,000 (of the approximately 60,000 liberated) were Jews. This representedbetween one third and one half of all the Jews who survived the Holocaust[11].
This fact was noted at liberation by the army cameramen, many of whose dope sheetcaptions refer speci� cally to Jews. In his dope sheet of April 24, Sergeant Oakesrecorded:
An inmate tells the world. Helen Goldstein, a Pole—Her crime: being bornfrom Jewish extraction. Four years in concentration camps, but was only heretwo weeks before the British arrived[12].
Later Oakes said:
The children in Camp No. 2 which is now the hospital and evacuating campfor camp No. 1, are getting very well cared for. The vast majority of them areeither Jewish or of Jewish extraction[13].
One particular caption for a photograph showing emaciated women records:
… the unfortunate civilians who had slowly been tortured to death, in mostcases their only crime being that they were born Jewish[14].
Sergeant Mike Lewis, another AFPU cameraman, recalled the incredulity of theprisoners when they realised he was Jewish[15]. They could not understand why he wasstill free. In an interview conducted many years later he recalled:
I’ll always remember one woman staring at me in astonishment. She ex-claimed, in Yiddish: ‘You are Jewish—and you are free?’[16].
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This immediate recognition and acknowledgement of the fact that so many of theprisoners were Jewish was echoed by Leslie Hardman, who was a Jewish padre in thearmy. The inmates were surprised that he was a Jewish soldier in uniform, but alsooverwhelmingly relieved that they now had someone with whom they could converseeasily and who could administer religious services for them. He frequently describes theinmates as ‘my people’[17].
The Liberation of Belsen
The term ‘concentration camp’ originated during the Boer War in South Africa at thebeginning of the 20th century. The British army gathered together many of the familiesof the Afrikaner � ghters, placing them in ‘concentration camps’. These camps becamenotorious because of the high mortality rate due to disease and poor conditions. Thesecamps are still referred to by Afrikaners in South Africa today as an example of howthey suffered at the hands of the British. However, they were nothing like the concen-tration camps of the Nazis, which were deliberately designed to in� ict disease and deathon their inmates.
Sergeant Ernest Oakes recalled that at one stage he was billeted with a Germanfamily who referred to the Boer War camps, insisting that the concept for concentrationcamps had therefore been British[18]. The important point here is that in 1945 the ideaof the existence of concentration camps was not an alien one, either in Germany or inBritain. As early as 1933 Dachau had been presented to the world, by the Nazis, as amodel camp for political prisoners, while air reconnaissance photographs clearlyshowed the existence of Auschwitz in April 1944[19]. However, what was not clearfrom this previous knowledge and information was the scale of the camps and thebrutality of the conditions within them. As Sergeant Oakes states in his commentaries;
Often we have heard from the Russians and other sources of atrocitiescommitted by the enemy. Today we have seen enough which removes anyshadow of doubt from our minds[20].
As the Russians had advanced on the Eastern front, the Germans had begun to retreatand had taken the precaution of removing much of the evidence from the most easterncamps like Auschwitz and Maidanek before they were overrun. It was still perfectlyobvious what had in fact taken place in these camps, but the Germans had removedmany thousands of inmates who were still able to walk and sent them on interminable‘death marches’ to camps further West. They had also attempted to destroy thecrematoria within the camps and the camp guards themselves had � ed. This was simplynot possible to the same degree in the Western camps. The Germans had nowhere elseto transport the inmates to and the speed of the Allied advance meant that they hadlittle opportunity to disguise the situation before they arrived.
This did not prevent further atrocities being committed by the Germans as they � edbefore the advancing Allies on both fronts. At Gardelegen, the German guards escort-ing a group of prisoners who hampered their progress locked them all into a barn whichthey soaked with petrol and then set on � re. They waited with machine guns to shootanyone who tried to escape, before � eeing themselves. This was not an isolatedincident, although it was probably the most widely reported in the British press.Margaret Bourke-White, the American photographer, visited Erla where inmates hadbeen enticed inside a barrack with the promise of food. Once inside the guards set � reto it and only a handful of survivors remained to tell their story to Bourke-White[21].
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Horror in Our Time 211
In contrast the discovery of the concentration camp at Belsen was a strangely calmand to a certain extent orderly affair. The situation in Belsen was different principallybecause of the raging typhus epidemic that had gripped the camp. Close to the city ofHanover, and the smaller town of Celle, in north-west Germany, the Germans realisedthey could not simply abandon the camp and allow wandering inmates to spread typhusthrough the neighbouring countryside. As Lieutenant Wilson of the AFPU described,hunger was also a problem:
Of the 60,000 inmates all but the very latest arrivals are suffering fromstarvation, with 60,000 demented people on their hands, the Nazi guardrealised that here was one camp they could not move in time to beat therapidly advancing 11th Armoured Division. Consequently, a representation ofGerman of� cers came through our lines[22].
The Germans weighed up their options and negotiated a truce with the advancingBritish troops. This precipitated a delay of about three days, between the � rst knowl-edge of the existence of the camp and the actual British takeover on 15 April 1945.Interestingly, on 11 April, the SS guards actually attempted to conceal the 10,000unburied corpses that remained in the camp[23]. However, this indication of somesense of guilt was not evident to the soldiers who � rst entered the camp. Nor did theysucceed in burying many of the corpses because the � rst days of British administrationwere focused entirely on this gruesome task.
The terms of the truce allowed only medical units associated with relief work to enterthe camp. As Sergeant Oakes noted:
About four days ago, two German of� cers entered the British lines under a� ag of truce to negotiate for a neutral area around Bergen as the concentrationcamp there was a typhus area. The original negotiations fell through but it was� nally agreed that the enemy would be allowed to withdraw from the arealeaving an armed Hungarian guard which would be returned to the enemyafter the truce period[24].
It also permitted the SS administrative staff to remain, along with Josef Kramer, thecommandant.
Derrick Sington, one of the � rst British soldiers to enter the camp, was disconcertedby the behaviour of Kramer when the British arrived. Kramer had conducted theBritish on a tour of the camp and the normality of his behaviour in the face of suchhorror was something the British soldiers found enormously dif� cult to comprehend.Kramer exposed his feelings in a small but telling incident described by Jon Bridgman:
Sington happened to be near Kramer when one of the prisoners went downshot by a guard. Furiously he turned to Kramer and shouted: ‘Pick that manup and take him to hospital! Kramer looked at Sington with amazement, butwhen Sington pulled his revolver he reluctantly obeyed[25].
The incongruity of this attitude was not lost on the British. Nor was the fact that theSS administrative staff and Kramer had remained behind when they must have had anopportunity to escape. Sington and his colleagues discussed the suggestion that theymight have believed that, by helping the British to clear the camp of typhus, they couldearn themselves special favours.
But this grotesque attempt at collaboration was perhaps indicative of some-thing else. Had the racial teaching of Himmler’s schools really succeeded inmaking these SS men regard Jews and ‘Haftlinge’ [political prisoners] as a
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species of poisonous rat? Did they really feel no more concern at the shootingthrough the stomach of a beautiful Jewish girl, or the death from slowstarvation of an innocent man, than a normal person might feel at thein� iction of a similar fate on a rat? It is possible[26].
It is this sense of disbelief and incomprehension that permeates the accounts of the� rst people to enter Belsen. It was also a prominent feature of the reaction by the � rstnewspaper and radio correspondents to reach the concentration camps. The over-whelming impression is that, although people may have had some idea that the Naziswere virulently anti-Semitic and that they were particularly intolerant of dissension,no-one could have conceived a scene as awful as the one with which they were nowconfronted. In addition, the � rst reports, particularly Sington’s account, present a clearsense of the chaos that pervaded the liberation of Belsen, the scale of the horror was soenormous that they simply did not know where to start. Added to this was theincomprehensible fact that men such as Kramer had presided over this horror whileremaining impervious to the sufferings of the inmates.
The AFPU in Belsen
Once the truce had been negotiated at Belsen the British soldiers of the 11th ArmouredDivision moved in. They were totally unprepared for the scene which confronted them:about 60,000 emaciated, disease-ridden inmates remained in the camp along withapproximately 10,000 unburied corpses[27]. The overwhelming misery and all-encom-passing stench of the camp are repeatedly recalled by anyone who visited the camp inthe weeks following its liberation. The unburied corpses and the fact that so many ofthe inmates were suffering from typhus and other diseases meant that there were severalimmediate problems to be dealt with. The inmates had been without food and water forseveral days, but because the troops which entered the camp were ahead of the mainforces it was impossible to deal with this desperate situation immediately.
Derrick Sington recalled that on his � rst day in Belsen, immediately after the Britishhad moved in, there were problems in simply distributing food to the inmates[28]. Partof the problem was that some of the inmates were so sick that they could not move fromtheir barracks. The fear was that if food was given to other inmates to take back to thebarracks the sick prisoners would simply receive no food. There was also the added fearthat any attempt to distribute food generally throughout the camp might lead to adisastrous stampede for food by the prisoners. This would not only create chaos, withthe possibility of death, but the severe state of emaciation of most of the prisonersmeant that eating could in fact kill them. As a result the distribution of food wasdelayed by a further day, until an effective distribution system could be put intooperation.
At the time, Leslie Hardman described the terrible frustration of wanting to do somuch more than one was actually capable of doing. He also mentions the fact that inthose desperate � rst few days inmates were indeed killed by the well meaning, butignorant intentions of those who fed the starving. Hardman also mentioned a problemwhich was possibly not noticed and is certainly not commented on by others. Herecalled that a visiting of� cer to the camp made the tasteless comment: ‘Bloody Jews it’sgood for them.’ Hardman was understandably incensed, disbelieving that in the sightof such tragedy people could still be so callous towards the Jews[29].
However, it also indicates the strange existence of humour that was present in the
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Horror in Our Time 213
camp. Sergeant Bill Lawrie remembered making a speci� c joke while burying the dead,something along the lines of: ‘… look out here comes a beauty’. He also alluded to theproblems that the soldiers themselves had in dealing with the situation when he saidthat:
… we very seldom discussed the camp among ourselves … if there was anydiscussion about the camp in the evenings … it was always a joke[30].
Margaret Bourke-White, the American photographer, photographed the camp atBuchenwald, but her position was different to that of the AFPU cameramen, becauseshe was not part of a tightly-knit group who made a detailed record of the camp.However, she re� ects on the distance that being a photographer helped her to achieve.In a sense she could hide behind her camera, see the scene entirely in terms of a frameof � lm, rather than a human tragedy exposed in front of her.
Using the camera was almost a relief; it interposed a slight barrier betweenmyself and the white horror in front of me[31].
This was something that Alfred Kantor, an inmate of Theresienstadt [32], and thenAuschwitz, commented on in relation to the art that he created in the camps.
I realise now … that my commitment to drawing came out of a deep instinctof self-preservation and undoubtedly helped me to deny the unimaginablehorrors of life at that time. By taking on the role of an ‘observer’ I could atleast for a few moments detach myself from what was going on in Auschwitzand was therefore better able to hold together the threads of sanity[33].
It seems logical to assume that the AFPU cameramen also adopted a similar attitude,or perhaps responded to the same natural reaction, simply to help them through thedays of harrowing work.
There were other logistical problems associated with the � rst few days following theliberation of Belsen. Along with the necessity of feeding the inmates was that ofproviding them with water. The British set up some water tanks with which to ease theimmediate problem. However, it appears that the Germans were not entirely willing tohelp rectify the situation. Sergeant Oakes in his dope sheet of 20 April recorded:
Things are getting really organised now and today the not-so-sick prisonersare being completely unclothed, washed and then re clothed … This was dueto have started this morning but unfortunately four Fokker-Wolves[Germanplanes] came over and bombed the water system and deliberately strafed the� eld ambulance. The truce period expired last night. Three medical of� cerslost their lives during the raid[34].
The front line was only a few miles from the camp and this report is a timelyreminder of the imminent danger of the military situation at the time.
Without doubt, the most prominent feature commented on in almost all of theearliest reports following the liberation of the camp at Belsen was the burial of thenumerous corpses which littered the camp. The actual number of unburied corpses isunclear. The awful conclusion is that there were simply too many to count. A � gurefrequently quoted in the cameramen’s dope sheets is 10,000; however, at the trial ofJosef Kramer, the Belsen commandant, the � gure quoted was 13,000[35]. The sheerweight of numbers left an enormous task for the liberating troops.
The inmates themselves were generally oblivious to the fact that there were so manycorpses literally strewn around the camp. They were in fact quite accustomed to sittingand eating their meagre rations while leaning their backs against a pile of bodies[36].
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AFPU pictures clearly show women stripping the clothes from the bodies of deadwomen lying outside their barracks, to use for fuel[37]. Lieutenant Wilson noticed:
In the crowded central ‘laager’ [prison] two women pause in their aimlesswanderings to view—with noticeable apathy—two of the inmates who havesuccumbed to starvation and lie dead in the pathway[38].
Apart from the problems of disease being spread from rotting corpses, there was alsoevidence that cannibalism had become a practise among the inmates. As SergeantMidgeley wrote after a visit to Belsen:
We spoke to a Brigadier M.O. He told us that on inspection they found slitsin the sides of many bodies, they inquired about this and were told that thelivers and kidneys were removed by the other inmates for food. He asked whynot the � esh. The reply was—‘What � esh’—there was no � esh left[39].
Part of the operation of clearing the camp had to involve the mental rehabilitation ofthe former inmates. For this reason alone there had to be some establishment ofnormality, some sense of moral order, which included the burial of the forgotten dead.
At this point the SS men became useful and performed a duty that had previouslybeen the unpleasant task of their prisoners. As Lieutenant Wilson reported:
It was decided that … the SS men who had ‘run’ the camp … should be takenas legitimate prisoners, disarmed and set to work—their � rst task appropri-ately enough—was to remove and bury some of the thousands of dead theyhad so methodically starved during the past few weeks[40].
The SS men were put to work and the reports suggest that it affected them deeply.Sergeant Midgeley described the scene:
They were made to load lorries with bodies. They were kept on the move byour soldiers picking up bodies from a heap and throwing them unceremoni-ously onto the trucks. The other inmates watched the loading, booing andshouting and throwing stones at the SS thugs. When the trucks were loadedthe SS men were made to jump on top of the pile of bodies and the trucksdrove off to the burial place … The SS men were really being broken down,some cried and sobbed as they were rushed about in their horrible task ofpicking up the corpses[41].
The whole undertaking was on a huge scale and led to perhaps one of the mostshocking images of the camps. A bulldozer was employed to push the bodies into themass graves which had been dug. Hardman appealed against this apparent lack ofrespect:
A large bulldozer was at work … Now its jaws closed, it thrust its enormoussnub-nose into the mound of corpses, pushing, pushing it towards the edge ofthe pit … I went up to the of� cer in charge of the burial operations. Two SSmen were working under his instructions. As the corpses were pushed to theedge of the pit, they took what bodies they could grasp—bodies interlocked,coagulated, disintegrated—and threw them into the huge … common grave.As I looked down on these poor pitiful bodies, a great sadness came over me.Man returns to dust, but must he return like refuse thrown into a bin? I turnedto the of� cer in charge. ‘Is it not possible to show some reverence to the dead?’‘Padre I deeply regret it, but we must bury them as quickly as possible; apartfrom the ghastly sight, there is the danger of disease’[42].
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FIG. 1. SS guards helping to load the bodies.
FIG. 2. The bulldozer at work.
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A British soldier, Private Frederick Riches, commented:
The chap I felt sorry for mostly was a little chap in the engineers … The of� cerwas getting them to throw the bodies in because none of them had anyidenti� cation on them no bracelets, no nothing, just throw ’em straight in.Then another of� cer came along and said, ‘Look you’re wasting your timedoing that, put your bulldozer back on it.’ So he was put in and this chapdidn’t like it at � rst. Then he started pushing them in and that’s how it wenton from there[43].
Hardman’s pleadings did eventually have some effect as smaller mass graves were dug.
Again I pleaded for reverence and the bodies for the smaller mass graves weretaken to the edge on lorries; then the SS were made to take them down oneby one and lay them side by side in their last resting place[44].
The of� cial British war artist Leslie Cole who also visited Belsen at this time, re� ectedon the same scene when he wrote:
The SS guards were not over careful with the bodies and were made to go intothe pit and create some semblance of order if the pit was not being neatly� lled[45].
This work continued under the watchful eyes of those who had survived the camps asthey stood and jeered at the SS men. Sergeant Oakes annotated pictures of the scene:
Roll 3, picture 4; Three of the SS swine drop exhausted. Picture 5; ‘Shootthem—shoot them!’. Picture 6–7; ‘You killed my father, my mother, my wholefamily!’[46].
In addition to venting their anger against the guards in this way, the camp survivorsalso recorded testimonies for the newsreel cameras in front of the mass graves. As thecaption for one photograph reads:
British newsreel operators recorded for the world the stories of survivors andtook statements from some of the SS camp of� cials[47].
These included a statement from a Dr Klein, Belsen’s equivalent of the infamous DrMengele of Auschwitz. As Sergeant Oakes recorded:
Eight pictures of Dr Klein as SS doctor who has committed to death thou-sands of men, women and children. He has experimented to some extent ininjecting Benzine into his victims so as to harden the arteries … In No. 8 heis speaking for the Movietone News sound truck, actually he only came to thiscamp a few days before its liberation but he is well-known amongst theinmates who have met him at various camps[48].
For many people still alive in Belsen, at the time of the liberation, it was already toolate. Leslie Cole again captures the reality of the situation when he annotated one of hispaintings with the following:
During my visit the victims were still dying in the open and the woman in thecentre of the picture collapsed while I was drawing. There are many bodieslying about clothed and unclothed and these were left as the British M.O.s hadnot enough personnel to check if death had set in. If the body disappeared atnight it was alive[49].
The effects of such long-term starvation and exposure to disease meant that as manyas 500 people a day continued to die in the � rst week following the liberation[50].
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FIG. 3. Mass grave with Dr Klein also pictured.
Trying to check this death rate occupied the time of the soldiers in the camp whodesperately tried to save those who they felt might live. Appeals went out to theteaching hospitals in London requesting volunteers to aid the process of trying toprevent yet more deaths. Some of the experiences described by these students are quitehorri� c as they were abruptly confronted with the grim reality of the concentrationcamps. Alan Macaulsan described the shocking scene that confronted them when they� rst entered one of the � lthy huts.
There was faeces all over the � oor … But the � oor was a minor considerationcompared to the beds and the people … the people with diarrhoea did notbother to get out of bed … The worst cases had their hands covered with driedexcreta, but it did not stop them eating or scratching[51].
In addition, the medical students and the other medical of� cers had to make thedif� cult decisions regarding who should be evacuated next. For some, their only chanceof survival was emergency treatment away from the camp. But should they be evacu-ated ahead of someone who would be more likely to survive in the end?
The MO went into each hut and marked on the forehead of each patient across to indicate to the bearers that this patient would be moved. The MOmade no attempt to � x a diagnosis—all he did was decide whether the patient
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had any chance of living if he or she were moved or what the chance ofsurvival might be if the patient were left in the camp for another week. It wasa heart-rending job and amounted to telling hundreds of poor wretches thatthey were being left to die[52].
It was natural that in this situation the inmates would struggle to make sure that theywere moved as soon as possible. As a former Belsen inmate who had managed tostruggle to the hospital described:
This was my life and I knew. And I said, I’m sorry I cannot go back and I willnot go back because if I do, tomorrow I’ll be dead and I know that … I wouldask you to shoot me right here because I will not go. Ten o’clock next morning… he came with a military truck … where, when the doors were opened, therewere four stretchers … all full. But he brought one extra and a sheet. He …wrapped me up in the sheet strapped me on the stretcher which was lying inbetween the four—illegally—closed the door and off we went[53].
The medical authorities were very anxious that the rehabilitation services of theBritish Army would be overloaded and tried to prevent such individual rescue attempts,but inevitably, they continued to happen, as compassion overcame obedience.
The AFPU spent many reels of � lm, both cine and still, portraying the � rst few daysfollowing the liberation. Many of the images re� ect the situations described above:mass graves, people living in unimaginable squalor and the continuing death ofhundreds of the inmates, but the cameramen also recorded the gradual stages ofrecovery for the majority of inmates.
Some of the former inmates were even well enough to help with the medical care ofothers, while others helped to set up and teach in the school that was created in thecamp[54]. This was an important step in restoring self esteem among those who hadbeen systematically dehumanised by the Nazi system. It also gave them less time toconsider the daunting prospect of what they would do now that they had beenliberated. However, for the vast majority, special care and attention was an immediatenecessity.
The British soldiers set up makeshift showers for the inmates, which they used withsome alacrity, to the embarrassment of some of the soldiers standing nearby. ‘SergeantJ. Thompson of Glasgow of the mobile bath unit … � nds himself in undreamed ofcircumstances’[55]. Doris Zinkeisen, another of� cial British war artist, recorded amemorable scene of the ‘human laundry’ at Belsen[56] where the inmates werecarefully washed and dusted with DDT to try and prevent the spread of lice and typhus.
The ‘laundry’ was set up in an old stable block at a former German Army barracksnearby, which was far more comfortable for the inmates than their previous huts.However, it does indicate how short of facilities the British troops were. They weresimply unable to deal with the vast numbers of people at the camps, especially in a warsituation. The inmates themselves were also nervous, they had become so conditionedby their experiences that they found the soldiers frightening especially when they woreprotective clothing while evacuating inmates. The former prisoners simply thought itwas another ploy to get them into the gas chambers. As Sergeant Oakes described:
Some of the patients were very dubious when being unclothed by theR.A.M.C. [the Royal Army Medical Corps] men (who were specially pro-tected by decontamination suits) as they think they are going to a gas chamberwhich was the German treatment for the sick[57].
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FIG. 4. The human laundry.
The importance to the inmates of simply being rid of their former rags is describedin the commentary for a photograph depicting women waiting to be evacuated in anambulance.
Before we could evacuate the maimed and diseased internees of Belsen … theyhad � rst to be stripped of their foul and vermin-ridden rags … It is interestingto note that although these people have been systematically degraded overconsiderable periods, once primitive necessities of food and warmth had beenmet—the patients—particularly the women—were almost immediately cryingfor clothes. Thus clothes became a medical necessity, a powerful tonic, astrong antidote against the mental apathy of the very weak[58].
An important aspect that the AFPU cameramen also focused on was the health of thefew children who had somehow managed to survive the camp. Many were orphans buthad been looked after by other prisoners, who sacri� ced much to keep them alive, butthe experience had clearly taken its toll on the younger inmates. As Sergeant Oakesrecorded:
Pictures of French children now cared for in camp No. 2. Some of them arestill quite unemotional and cannot smile[59].
However, when a deputation of British Members of Parliament visited the campslater on, they commented on the fact that the children looked remarkably well,considering their surroundings and attributed this to the small, but vital contributionsof the adults held in the camp. This was interpreted as a clear demonstration of the
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FIG. 5. Members of the RAMC evacuating inmates while wearing decontamination suits.
inability of the Nazis to entirely destroy the humanity of their prisoners, which was animportant message to try and relay to the British public as a whole.
The AFPU images show British soldiers playing on swings with the children, orgiving them a cuddle. As a photograph issued in May 1945, entitled ‘Belsen children—relief work’ recorded:
Probably for the � rst time in their lives children in Belsen camps are able tolaugh and play normally. Sweets, toys and clothing have been sent in fromoutside the camp—some commandeered, some given by soldiers and relieforganisations. These four babies, wearing new boots and warm clothes look allthe brighter since the British took over their welfare[60].
As a direct contrast to these images of children, and the humanity that their survivalrepresented, the cameramen also ensured that they recorded the female SS guards whowere seen as having betrayed their sex by behaving in such a cruel fashion especiallywhen some of their victims were children. The most notorious of them was Irma Grese,informally dubbed the ‘Bitch of Belsen’ alongside the ‘Beast of Belsen’ Josef Kramer.Lieutenant Wilson commented:
SS women! These gay lassies were prison wardresses and according to thewomen inmates were just as brutal and twice as vicious as the men. They, too,
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FIGS. 6 & 7. Children recovering in Belsen.
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FIG. 8. Irma Grese.
have been searched and are being marched off to custody where they will beemployed on menial tasks, cooking and cleaning until they come to be triedfor their � agrant crimes[61].
In fact a further dope sheet from 18 April, by Sergeant Oakes records that the SSwomen were also put to work transporting and burying the dead.
The AFPU were effectively making a record of the camp, trying to record the vitalelements of the scene before it disappeared. Both Sergeant Bill Lawrie and SergeantOakes recalled that because no-one outside the camp really knew what it was like theywere not given any speci� c instructions regarding what they should � lm. Bill Lawrie,especially, remembered that the situation changed so much from day to day that theywere only loosely directed as to what they should � lm and essentially it was left up tothe individual cameraman[62].
The compassion with which they viewed their subjects is evident from the commentsthe cameramen make in their dope sheets. The sense of fury present in the captionsreferring to the SS is almost palpable, reading their comments not only provides thecontext of the image, but also indicates the emotions that these scenes inspired. Forexample, Sergeant Oakes’ dope sheet of 18 April primarily deals with the burying of thecorpses, but accompanying the last four pictures of Roll 1 is the caption ‘Pictures of theBritish tommies … ‘having dif� culty in restraining their not so � ner feelings’. Later
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FIG. 9. Josef Kramer closely guarded by British troops.
Sergeant Oakes’ own ‘� ner feelings’ are revealed by the caption ‘Push, Germanswine—push!’ Captions like this convey the distinct impression that despite the calmdisposition which the cameramen appear to have cultivated and retained in order to dotheir job, the emotions of frustration, shock, horror, disgust and sheer fury were not farbeneath the surface.
Neither of these comments appear in the of� cial captions which accompany thesephotographs in the catalogues. However, this understandable reaction of the camera-men and soldiers who liberated the camps is directly commented on by RichardDimbleby of the BBC who recorded:
I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men whoopened the Belsen camp this week, and those of the police and the RAMCwho are now on duty there, trying to save the prisoners who are not too fargone in starvation[63].
A number of other reports also recorded the fury of American soldiers who liberatedthe camp at Dachau.
The difference to the general scene that clearing the corpses made was an indicationof how quickly the hell that the Nazis had created was being eradicated. Although therewas still a very long way to go and it was not until 21 May that the last hut wasceremonially burnt, the cameramen were well aware that they were � lming a swiftlydisappearing entity. As the cameramen moved around the camp, they made up theirminds about what they were going to � lm on that particular day, depending on thescenes that presented themselves. There was effectively so much going on that it wasa case of trying to get as much down as possible. This is illustrated by a comment on
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FIG. 10. An Englishman in Belsen.
Sergeant Oakes’s dope sheet for 18 April, which reads; ‘No. 11 was used on each rollbecause the occasion demanded it’[64]. Normally only 10 exposures were used on eachroll and it is indicative of the situation that Oakes felt compelled to use 11.
The cameramen were particularly scrupulous about recording the names and occu-pations of those who visited the camps. They attempted, where possible, to photographinmates with people who had recognisable authority. For example, when the localGerman of� cials visited, mayors were photographed next to emaciated inmates, so thatthe picture was further corroborated as truth, in the eyes of the public, both British andGerman, but especially German. They were also careful to record the names of theinmates, in order to emphasise the huge range of people who had been punished in thecamps. For example, there is a photograph of an Englishman rescued in Belsen.
The Englishman: Louis Bonergner born in London … Belgian parents butclaims British nationality, was a spy for Britain and parachuted into Germanyin 1941, but was caught[65].
Another caption for the same photograph reads:
A British soldier listens in horror to the ghastly story told to him by a starvingLondoner, who still wears his prison rags[66].
This later caption accompanied the photograph when it appeared in the Britishnewspapers. It is interesting to note that this later caption emphasises much moredirectly the English roots of this man and excludes any reference to his more cosmo-
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politan existence. It also clearly illustrates the extent to which it was thought necessaryto provide the British public with direct links to the camps.
Captain Malandine similarly recorded in his dope sheet of 17 April that:
Among the 60,000 was a British woman a niece of the former Prime Ministerof Canada, Viscount Bennett. Madame Chassaigne who, with hundreds ofothers had been marched from Hanover, being without water from the 5thApril ‘till the 15th[67].
By identifying these particular survivors, the AFPU were further authenticating theimages for the British public. However, it was also a clari� cation of the message thatthese camps did involve the British people as much as other Europeans. It wasimportant to make them understand that these camps were a problem that all of theAllied countries had to take note of, not just those countries that had been occupied.
It was this process of exposing the true nature of the camps to the people of the Alliedcountries that was continued by the arrival of the war correspondents. The materialrecorded by the AFPU was used frequently in the British national press, but it was upto the journalists and reporters to make sense of it and interpret the story for a wideraudience. The af� davits recorded by the AFPU cameramen went on to be used at theNuremberg trials, although Kramer and the other Belsen guards were actually triedmuch earlier at Luneburg, in a separate trial held between 17 September and 17November 1945. Kramer and 10 others were subsequently hanged.
The AFPU stayed in Belsen until the camp was burnt to the ground on 21 May1945. This � nal image of Belsen also appeared in the British press, providing a vividend note to the story of the camp. The AFPU unit that had covered the story movedon to other assignments or returned to England. All retained their vivid memories of thecamp and the scenes that they recorded to provide the public throughout the worldwith a permanent record of the horror that followed the liberation of the concentrationcamps.
In trying to make a believable record, the AFPU cameramen strove to create asympathetic picture of the survivors. They depicted the children who were seenrecovering gradually and the inmates who made it to hospital. At the same time this wascontrasted with the faces of the SS guards, Kramer, and the female guards. Theyshowed the reality of the camps, the huge mass graves, the bodies literally scatteredeverywhere and the graphic state of emaciation of those who had survived. Above allthey tried to demonstrate that these people were human beings. They picked outindividuals and emphasised that they were educated, intelligent and in some cases evenBritish.
Nearly all these key themes are followed in reports of the camp which appeared in thenewspapers and newsreels. However there is one striking difference. Where appropriatethe AFPU cameramen commented on the religion of the inmates, often simply notingthe fact that the majority of them were Jewish. This was not echoed in later reports,where concerns about how the story would be received by the British public began toexert more in� uence over reporters and cameramen.
The responsibility for transferring this story directly to the British public fell to thewar correspondents and it was their reports that accompanied the pictures into thenewspapers and onto the radio and newsreels. These correspondents perhaps had aclearer sense of their public than the men of the AFPU and they and their editors wereespecially concerned about the impact that these powerful, graphic, images might have.These were immensely powerful and shocking scenes and there was nothing to suggest
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FIG. 11. A frequent image in the British Press, a girl who had been beaten by the SS guards in Belsen.
that they would lose any of their impact when viewed by the public. For this reason thecorrespondents were well aware that they were presenting the unsuspecting public withsomething that would shock and horrify them. If seasoned reporters and soldiers couldbarely cope with the scenes, then what would be the reaction of civilians who had, toa large extent, been shielded throughout the war from any images of death[68]? Whatwas to prevent the public from feeling entirely sickened so that they simply turnedaway?
In spite of these fears, the correspondents adopted a similar attitude to that of theAFPU cameramen, adopting a common feeling that the story had to be told and asaccurately as possible. That it was the duty of everyone and anyone who visited thecamps in those early days to tell the truth about them to a wider audience. Above all,there had to be no question that the images and the story itself was anything less thanauthentic.
The Story Reaches Britain
The AFPU highlighted certain themes throughout their � lming of the camps. Inparticular, they emphasised the humanity of their subjects, the shocking presence ofchildren in the camps and they meticulously recorded places, dates and names toensure their footage was authenticated. They also created a series of images which
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FIG. 12. Belsen burning.
would become indelibly marked on the British consciousness. The way in which theseimages were used in the British press re� ected these themes and the intentions of thecameramen that had taken them. However there were signi� cant changes in the way thematerial was used. Certain images were much more prominently portrayed than others,certain themes were emphasised more than others and the personal, telling, commentsof the cameramen on their dope sheets were edited out, leaving a less personal, moreliteral presentation of the horri� c facts.
Before these images reached the public they had to pass the scrutiny of editors andcensors, challenging their perceptions of what should and should not reach the frontpages of Britain’s newspapers and what should and should not be shown on � lm atcinemas across the country. This was a very pertinent dilemma which seriouslyconcerned the people responsible for making these decisions. The main issue was thatthroughout the war the British public had been deliberately sheltered, images of horrorand particularly images of death had been conspicuous by their absence from newspa-pers and newsreels. As a result there was an understandable fear as to how the publicwould react when presented with the graphic images of the camps. The key concernwas that the public would be so shocked that they would simply turn away in horrorand refuse to look again, or that they would simply disbelieve what they were seeing anddismiss it as propaganda. Ultimately, if these images were to be shown to the Britishpublic they had to be utterly convincing and they had to be presented in a way whichensured that people looked and looked again, rather than turning away in disgust.
Two completely separate incidents reveal the depth of the concern that was felt andthe attitudes that had to be overcome in order to actually publish the reports andfootage of the camps. The � rst occurred when Richard Dimbleby sent his � rst report
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from Belsen, his editors at the BBC were anxious about its authenticity and repeatedlycalled Dimbleby to check its veracity. Dimbleby himself recalled:
… when they heard it some people wondered if Dimbleby had gone off hishead or something. I think it was only the fact that I’d been fairly reliable upto then that made them believe the story[69].
Even so, the BBC refused to broadcast the report until it had been veri� ed bynewspaper reports. In response Dimbleby said he would resign from his job if the reportwas not broadcast immediately. The result was an immediate, if abbreviated report,which was broadcast on 19 April 1945[70].
The second incident occurred when the of� cials of the different newsreel companiesmet to discuss the footage of the camps that had emerged. An of� cial from the Ministryof Information reported:
I took the opportunity … of seeing this � lm (of the camps) with the principalsof the � ve newsreel companies … Mr Cummins immediately expressed theintention of using the material … Sir Gordon Craig and Mr Sanger took theview that, pictorially, it was not entirely convincing and that, to show suchpictures unless they were convincing, might have a boomerang effect since thepublic might query the authenticity … Movietone therefore, do not propose touse the material. So far as I can judge, the other three companies could notmake up their minds one way or the other[71].
In the end British Movietone News did issue a newsreel � lm along with the othernewsreel companies, presumably having been convinced that the public would believethe authenticity of the footage, but the reticence which preceded their publication andthe similar qualms of the BBC, provide a striking example of the concerns whichexisted about presenting the British public with reports that would have a dramaticimpact.
The release of the pictures and reports from the concentration camps inspired afeeling of intense and profound shock almost universally among the people that theyreached. The stunned reactions of army personnel, war correspondents, Members ofParliament and the general public have been recorded and consistently repeated. Theemphasis is on how unbelievable the scenes were, how no-one could have imaginedwhat was now being witnessed. The BBC reporter Richard Dimbleby summed up theprevalent response when he said ‘No one could have imagined a scene like this, no oneeven hinted at what I was to see’[72].
The fact that a seasoned reporter like Dimbleby could react in such a manner givesan indication as to the likely impact on the British public. However, there was also aconsiderable fear that the British public would be sceptical as to the veracity of theimages. The perceived scepticism of the British public by cameramen and editors waspartly due to an infamous occasion in the First World War. During the war, the Britishgovernment had released a story about German soldiers committing atrocities inBelgium. The story was believed and inevitably it created a real air of distrust about‘atrocity propaganda’[73]. The impact of the so-called Bryce Report aroused anelement of distrust about atrocity stories which was still a matter of concern for theMinistry of Information in 1941. It commented:
It would certainly be wrong to take up an arbitrary stand against the use ofatrocity material. The principal objection is that it arouses as much fear as
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anger unless done very carefully … and the effect of the Bryce report in the lastwar should never be forgotten[74].
In October 1939 the government released a White Paper, a report on the concen-tration camps which was discussed in Parliament. The report con� rmed the existenceof camps in Germany and in particular focused on the camps at Buchenwaid andDachau. These camps, at this time in particular, contained large numbers of politicalprisoners and this fact was focused on in the report, which was widely discussed in thenewspapers at the time. However, the response was not exactly what the governmenthad been hoping for. Instead of stirring up anger and resentment towards the Germans,it actually provoked distrust about the government because people felt that if thegovernment had known about this information previously, which it clearly had, thanthey should have informed the public at the time and in particular when the wholequestion of appeasement was being debated. Ultimately, by at least some of the public,it was seen as a cynical government ploy that the material had not been released untilafter the declaration of war.
The Mass Observation[75] archive reveals the extent to which this was true:
All these details were known last September and yet we signed at Munich.This is the limit of hypocrisy unless it is more sinister and is the beginning ofa hate campaign[76].
Another wrote:
I hate the inconsistency of policy, that kept it all quiet … and now brings outthe story full-blast with exclamations of righteous horror[77].
A letter in the Manchester Guardian commented:
The facts of the brutal treatment of the Jews and opponents of the Nazis arewell known … and it does not serve any purpose of information to repeat themnow, months after the event, with the authority of the government[78].
Few people commented that they actually doubted the contents of the report and itcertainly did not encourage anyone to sympathise with the Nazi regime. However, thegovernment became aware that the public did not like to feel that they were beingmanipulated by propaganda and thought that ‘atrocity’ propaganda was particularlysusceptible to this problem. This led to an infamous Ministry of Information memoran-dum concerning ‘horror stuff, which it was felt … must be used very sparingly and mustdeal always with treatment of indisputably innocent people. Not with violent oppo-nents. And not with Jews’[79].
The Ministry of Information continued to debate the whole question of atrocitypropaganda throughout the war and continuously worried about how it would bereceived by the public. The extensive correspondence in the archive reveals the extentto which the topic was a cause of concern and the range of views that existed about howto use the information that they did receive regarding the persecution of the Jews andconditions in the concentration camps. For several different reasons the end result wasthat very little propaganda about the camps was released and when stories aboutpersecution in occupied Europe were issued they almost invariably did not mention theJews. It was partly as a result of this policy that the British public were generallyignorant of the concentration camps, before they were suddenly bombarded withreports and images in the pages of their daily newspapers and regular magazines.
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The Newspapers
The newspapers inevitably retained their own distinctive styles while reporting the storyof the camps. However, they also had to rely on the same pool of relatively limitedinformation, which insured that many of the vital details were the same. In general thepresentation of information was quite tentative until the delegation of MPs had visitedthe camps and produced a government White Paper con� rming what they had seen.Some of the papers dwelt on the more lurid stories, such as the wife of the commandantat Buchenwald, who allegedly requested the skins of prisoners with interesting tattooswhich she then used as lampshades. Others, in particular the Manchester Guardian,focused more intently on the reasons for the persecution and what should be done now,especially with the Jewish survivors. The letters of readers inevitably re� ected whichpaper they read. Those who read the Daily Herald, for example, tended towards theattitude that all Germans should now be hung, drawn and quartered. On the otherhand, the readership of, for example, The Times, provided more detailed argumentswhich debated the implications of living under a dictatorship.
The features of reporting on the camps, which have already been noted in the waythat the AFPU and the war correspondents handled the story, remained importantconcerns for newspaper editors as well. Among these the question of authenticity wasagain the primary factor.
One of the � rst events to be widely reported in the press was the setting up of thegovernment delegation which was to be sent to the camps to report back on conditionsand essentially to provide veri� cation for the stories. As a result, the reporting was quitebrief and tentative up to the point until the delegation returned and described their� ndings in a White Paper. Huge importance was attached to this document, because itwas seen as being devoid of propaganda, party interest or fabrication; in other words,it was seen as being irrefutable truth.
Further features of the earlier work carried out by the AFPU cameramen in thecamps also recurred in the national press. For example, the nationality of the inmateswas often reported and emphasised to demonstrate their variety and frequently theirinnocence. At the same time, in contrast to the AFPU, but in compliance with theattitudes of the Ministry of Information and the Foreign Of� ce, mention of Jews wasnoticeably absent. Speci� c mentions were rare, but there were some; for example, anearly article in the Evening Standard read: ‘The treatment of Jews was beyond descrip-tion. They received so much brutality they had no vestiges of humanity left’[80].
The face of evil incarnate was identi� ed as that of Josef Kramer and many articlesmentioned him and his guards. A typical caption read;
Look upon this evil face. It is the face of Josef Kramer. It is also the face ofNazi Germany for Kramer was commandant of Belsen. Now he is in thehands of the Allies. It is recorded that when he was taken ‘he wasunashamed’[81].
A photograph reproduced in the Illustrated London News identi� ed, in the same wayas the AFPU had done, the equal cruelty of the female SS guards: ‘The female � ends,well-nourished at Belsen, wielded the lash with equal violence as SS men. They showedabsolutely no remorse when arrested’[82].
The work of rehabilitation being carried out by the British Army was also a primaryfocus: pictures of children and recovering inmates appeared. By showing these imagesthe press underlined two important messages: � rst that many of the inmates wereinnocent, in the sense that they were clearly not political activists or criminals, and
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second, that the inmates were indeed ordinary human beings, which was not alwayseasy to relate to when the majority of images showed people with ‘… no vestiges ofhumanity left’[83]. This was an important element to try and emphasise because therewas a distinct danger that people would be repulsed by these images and in particularfail to view the inmates as human beings who could once have been their neighbours.
The press clearly identi� ed the fact that hundreds of inmates continued to die on adaily basis. However, one feature that rarely reached the front pages were the scenes ofmass burial, particularly that of the bulldozer pushing bodies, which were so much apart of life for those who were present in Belsen, in the days following liberation.
The photographs which accompanied press articles illustrate these themes clearly.There were several images which included � gures of authority with which the British orAmerican public could identify. It was necessary to include these pictures because theycon� rmed the reports to an incredulous public, in a manner that words alone could not.Photographs had been included in the reporting of Maidanek, a Polish camp liberatedby the Russians in 1945, but they did not have the same impact as those that nowappeared, partly because they were not authenticated in the same way.
The images that were now published in the British press were not the most graphicor horri� c. As the Daily Telegraph said:
More than a dozen photographs each giving indisputable testimony of thebestial cruelties … reached the Daily Telegraph yesterday; but they are of sucha revolting nature that it has been decided not to reproduce them[84].
Such images were, however, exposed in longer, generally magazine, articles such asthose in Picture Post or the Illustrated London News. The latter actually produced adetachable four-page supplement which carried the following warning:
Our subscribers with young families whom they would not desire to see thephotographs, can remove these pages. These revelations of coldly-calculatedmassacre and torture are given as a record for all time of German crimes, andare intended for our adult readers only[85].
This was a factor that affected many people. There was no question that suchphotographs had the potential to upset both adults and children to a very great extent.It was therefore important that people were not prevented from even reading thearticles because they were revolted by the pictures that greeted them on the front page.There was also concern that there could be long-term psychological effects on childrenif they were unexpectedly exposed to such photographs. The News Chronicle reportedon the views of child psychologists who thought that:
… a scene of horror, even if imperfectly understood, may create many neuroticsymptoms in the adult … A child is likely to re-enact in his games the frightfulscenes he has witnessed, and get pleasurable excitement from acting scenes ofsadistic cruelty, reactions of this kind often produce the delinquent in laterlife[86].
This is perhaps an overreaction, but the implication is clearly there, that people wereinherently concerned about the impact that these images could have. It also underlinesthe fact that, despite these concerns, editors were prepared to � nd a way in which theycould expose these images and reports. There was a commitment to reveal the truth,to show the public exactly what had taken place and not to shield them from the facts.The more horri� c images, such as scenes of mass burial using a bulldozer, were
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withheld, but without a doubt the articles which described such scenes were graphicand convincing.
The whole issue of how to present such a story to the public was very real. There hadnever been a story like this before and there was a real danger that the public would beso shocked and horri� ed that they would reject the information that the papers carried.Many of the later reports carried headlines emphasising the message that these thingshad to be witnessed and remembered for the sake of future generations. The wholeconcept was one of ‘Lest We Forget’, a headline frequently used in the papers,including the Evening Standard and the Illustrated London News[87]. The camps weresuch an extraordinary phenomenon they were viewed as a problem that the whole of thecivilised world had to confront. Even in the very earliest reports there were suggestionsthat people might try to deny that such things took place and it was therefore theresponsibility of the public to witness these images and attest to their truth if it wasquestioned.
The dif� culty of describing the scenes in any great detail for an audience who had noknowledge or experience of these things was enormous. Simply trying to � nd the rightwords was a huge effort. A long article written by Ronald Monson and published in TheEvening Standard illustrates this problem. The report contained two images, one ofKramer and another of a woman with serious facial injuries that was prominent on thefront page[88]. The report from Monson is very graphic and highlights the obviousdif� culty he had in expressing his feelings about what confronted him. His descriptionof the general conditions, the SS male and female guards, and the fact that peoplecontinued to die at a huge rate are similar to other reports, but his description of a pileof corpses was more idiosyncratic:
The indignity of death above ground—the bared teeth, the revealed frame thatshould be sacred, and once was sacred to some loved one, the piled bodies intheir ghastly greyness, the pitiable little thing with claws instead of a hand thatwas a baby, still within the protecting grasp of an emaciated bone that wasonce a mother’s arm—all on the Nazi death heap … Because of the nicetiesof language, because none should be offended unnecessarily, it is hard for meto tell you what is happening at this moment, alongside the piles of dead, youwill not completely understand[89].
Monson’s distress is palpable and as if to justify to himself what he is writing, hecontinues:
But as I have always been a truthful correspondent with an eye to fact ratherthan an ear for hearsay, believe me when I tell you that what I saw this day wasworse than anything I have ever seen anywhere.
This article harks back to many of the problems that confronted the AFPU. Theimpassioned plea to the readers to, at all costs, believe the unbelievable. The staking ofa reputation on this one story is an echo of Richard Dimbleby’s experience. However,the really distinctive feature about Monson’s report is the way in which he manages toemphasise the humanity of the victims even while he describes them as decayingcorpses in a disorderly pile. The fact that he identi� es with them as people who havebeen loved and who were capable of love themselves. The description of the dead babywho is still protected by its mother even in death is an extremely powerful image andone that many articles failed to capture. It is the conveying of the realisation that thesepeople were not merely statistical victims of horror, but human beings that once hademotions just like everyone else, that is so effective. It forces the reader to engage to an
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extent that they would rather not. It is much easier to read about statistics than toacknowledge the description of a little baby who has died as an innocent victim andbeen left to rot along with its mother and countless others.
Monson also manages to illustrate the ambivalence of the liberation of the camps.The fact that so many of those who survived the camps long enough to witness theliberation were in fact oblivious to it and did not survive for long enough to reap thebene� ts. This is something that is further demonstrated in the issue of 21 April 1945,when a series of photographs was published. The photographs graphically depicted theovercrowded conditions of the barracks, the anomaly that was termed a hospital andemphasised that the women in the photographs had little chance of survival, despite thepresence of the British army. As two of the captions explained:
The hospital again: These two women are dying as their liberators arrive.
and
From the charnel house inside to the sweet freedom of fresh air came thesevictims, to fall exhausted and too weak to go further, into huddled heapsaround the tree stump.
A fourth photograph on page four of the same issue depicts an emaciated man:
Living skeleton of Belsen. He is alive, but his body is little more than skeleton.He is yet another victim of Kramer, the Beast of Belsen[90].
All these images served to underline the tragically thin line that existed between life anddeath in the camps.
Photographs of Kramer were common in the newspapers, accompanied by headlinesand stories that urged that this man should be seen as less than human. It is, however,hard to escape the fact that Kramer really does not look particularly unusual. He doesnot appear to have an unbelievably wicked look in his eye, nor does he look like someincarnation from a horror � lm. It is perhaps this that is important and the message thatthe papers were attempting to convey. It was the fact that ostensibly ‘normal’ peoplehad committed these crimes that made them so heinous and led to the warnings thatit could happen again. The Evening Standard implied this by printing an article aboutKramer. The front page headline read ‘The Beast is dead’, alongside a close-upphotograph of Kramer’s face. The article went on to record that:
In interviews the Beast of Belsen declared: ‘I believe in God … ‘I am a goodGerman … I have no bad conscience about the people who died in my camp.Everything was done that could be done. All the trouble was transport andgeneral conditions’[91].
What is interesting is that after this article and another one about conditions atGardelegen and another camp there is a photograph entitled ‘Belsen’s children’. Thepicture shows two children asleep in a hospital bed. The caption explains:
They are children of Belsen, put to bed now in decent quarters. Doctors andnurses are working to save their lives, for they have typhus[92].
It is a stark comparison between the seemingly innocuous face on the front page andthe defenceless children that he had held prisoner. The children do look remarkablypeaceful, innocent and vulnerable, which adds to the poignancy of the image. Inaddition, there is still the threat of death hanging over them in the form of typhus,which serves to underline the fact that life is still not guaranteed for these children.
This is an aspect of the reporting of the camps that was problematic. The pictures in
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FIG. 13. The living skeleton.
the newspapers emphasized the recovery of inmates and the restorative role of theBritish army. This is understandable because these were clearly the more accessiblephotographs and engaged sympathy with the patently innocent victims. However, therewas perhaps a danger that photographs of peacefully sleeping children did not reallyexpose the horrors of the camps if they were taken out of context. One article illustratesthis peculiar blend of the positive reporting and the overwhelming nature of the horror,entitled ‘Belsen: life is catching up’ It notes the fact that:
Life is beginning to overtake death … The burial pits are still receiving theirmounds of nameless, emaciated corpses, but by hundreds now instead ofthousands. Yesterday about 1600 were buried—the � rst day since Britishforces entered the camp a week ago that the burials left the stacks of corpsessmaller at the end of the day than at the beginning[93].
One of the biggest dif� culties for newspapers appears to have been how to refer to theJewish populations within the camps. In some ways it almost seems as if there was anattitude that everyone knew that the Jews were the main victims and that no moreneeded to be said on the subject. There is once again the impression that echoes theearlier comments about the fact that Jews were always telling ‘atrocity stories’ and topay any great attention to them would simply encourage further ‘stories’. This is
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graphically illustrated in a later article in Time and Tide. ‘Belsen—an indictment of theGerman people’, written by J. L. Hodson, is an extended report from someone who hasobviously visited Belsen. In many ways it is like other reports that appeared in thenewspapers, except for one paragraph:
Near the burial of� ce is a blackboard … with the offences for which prisonerswere here … The offences included; Homo-sexuals; evangelists; intellectuals;red Spaniards; alien criminals; Jews (just the word Jew—nothing else); unso-cials; saboteurs; prisoners of war. A Jewish Rabbi said that in his view 70%were Jews, but, from other evidence, I think they probably did not exceed20%[94].
The author gives no indication as to why he believes this, or what the ‘other evidence’is, despite the fact that everything else the Rabbi says seems to be taken as truth. Thisincludes a story from Oswiecim (the polish name that used to describe Auschwitz inearly reports of the camps) where the Rabbi said ‘… Lorry loads of children were tippedinto pits, petrol poured over them and they were set on � re.’ It is a strong indictmentof the scepticism that surrounded the whole question of Jewish atrocities, even if thereasons for this are not apparent.
It was as stories such as these were being reported that the delegation of the MPs wasarranged. Churchill had ordered the delegation to be sent as soon as it was possible toarrange it. The Times reported that:
The Prime Minister … expressed the horror felt by the British governmentand their principle allies at the proofs of frightful crimes now daily coming intoview in German prison camps. Mr Churchill said he had received thismorning an informal message from General Eisenhower saying that thediscoveries … far surpassed anything previously exposed and inviting a bodyof members of parliament at once to visit his headquarters so that they mighthave ocular and � rst hand proof of the atrocities. The matter was of someurgency since it was not possible to arrest the processes of decay in manycases. The Prime Minister asked: ‘… the house to approve the somewhat rapiddecision which he had reached …’[95].
As this report implies the delegation was sent at the instigation of General Eisen-hower, who was keen for as many of� cial people as possible to visit the camps, so thatthey could report back to the general public with authority, before the camps werecleared. As a result, many delegations visited Buchenwald, besides the British parlia-mentary delegation. There were visits from the local of� cials of Weimar and thesurrounding area, but there were also visits from British newspaper editors, an AlliedWar Crimes Commission and a combined delegation of American congressmen andeditors[96]. Both the American congressional and British parliamentary delegationscontained female representatives. Both women, Clare Booth-Luce and Mavis Tate MP,were later used on the commentary for Movietone News newsreels.
Churchill himself was also deeply moved by the story of the camps, describingBuchenwald as the ‘acme of atrocity’[97]. Inevitably the question is raised of how muchChurchill had known before about the camps. Had he seen the reconnaissance photo-graphs of Auschwitz? If he had, why had he done nothing? Had he believed the reportsthat had come from the World Jewish Congress about the plans for extermination? Inthe summer of 1944, Victor Cavendish-Bentinck, Churchill’s Intelligence adviser,wrote:
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We weaken our case against the Germans by publicly giving credence toatrocity stories for which we have no evidence. These mass executions in gaschambers remind me of the story of the employment of human corpses duringthe 1914–18 war for the manufacture of fat. True stories of German enormi-ties will be brushed aside as being mere propaganda[98].
The whole question of authenticity and doubt over previous propaganda storiesin� uenced the attitudes of people, even at the very highest levels.
The MPs who made up the parliamentary delegation were chosen from across theparties. One woman, Mavis Tate, was chosen. She had already had some contact withthe camps, having ‘… eleven years earlier … rescued the wife and child of a formersocialist member of the Reichstag from one of them’[99]. The MP Sidney Silvermanwas the only Jewish member of the delegation. He had not originally been selected, butanother MP fell ill and Silverman went in his place at the last minute. The visit andsubsequent report was widely covered in the British press. Both The Times and the DailyTelegraph reproduced the report in full on Saturday, 28 April 1945. The report was veryof� cial in tone. It commented solely on what the MPs themselves had seen and nospeculation was allowed, as a declaration at the beginning of the report read:
… [the] purpose being to gather evidence while it was still fresh … and so totest the accuracy of the reports already published, the members have excludedfrom their report statements of which no material evidence was still vis-ible[100].
The Daily Telegraph led with the same headline as The Times: ‘Buchenwald: thelowest point of human degradation’, but added that the MPs were ‘Ineffaceablyhaunted by what they saw’[101]
The report began with a general description of the camp and the surroundingcountryside, before describing the size of the camp and estimating the number ofvictims at 51,572. The report attempted to categorise the inmates and began by clearlystating that: ‘Although the inmates of the camp are commonly referred to as“prisoners” they should not be confused with military prisoners of war’.
Three broad categories were then de� ned:
a) Political internees and Jews from Germany itself. b) As the Reich expanded,political internees and Jews from Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland etc. c)From 1940 onwards men and youths imported for forced labour from thevarious occupied countries.
The fact that Jews were speci� cally identi� ed as a persecuted group is notable;however, they then drew little further comment from the report. More importantly, noattempt was made to identify the relative numbers of the different groups of inmates orof victims in terms of their religion.
The report described in detail the living conditions in the bartacks, the exactdimensions of the overcrowded bunks and the overwhelming stench that permeated thecamp. The fact that many of the inmates were still likely to die despite the efforts of theAmerican troops was commented on. In addition, there were descriptions of theprocess of collecting the dead, the beatings that were regularly administered and theeffects of disease. In many respects therefore, the report is like the others that hadalready appeared in the papers. However, as the Oxford Mail commented, it had animportant role to play:
… the � rst thing to do in this matter is to con� rm by the mouth of as many
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authoritative witnesses as possible the fact that these atrocities were commit-ted by a nominally civilised people[102].
In this respect the report lent a certain gravity to the overall reporting of the camps,principally because of the entirely factual manner in which it is written and the fact thatit is presented as veri� ed evidence from trusted MPs. It subsequently led to a new � oodof letters and editorials in the papers, almost as if now the worst had really beencon� rmed, people felt more impetus to discuss it openly.
The MPs were studiously silent about their individual opinions in the report itself.However, after returning from Buchenwald, but before the report was published, MPSidney Silverman criticised the British government. He told the Manchester Guardianthat the Foreign Of� ce knew that Buchenwald existed in 1933, but they did nothingbecause they were trying to appease Germany at the time. But he also expressed someempathy with the German civilian population when he said:
If I had been a German citizen who knew these facts and who knew too, thata breath, a whisper of protest would have meant that my own children wouldhave been in Buchenwald the next morning. I would not have had the courageto do anything[103].
He therefore concluded that a greater responsibility lay with those who could havedone more from a position of safety, but who chose to do nothing. In other words, theBritish government.
Similarly, a letter in Time and Tide noted:
I � nd I cannot lay my hand on my heart and swear that were I a German whoknew the truth and abhorred what he knew and yet was aware that any protestmight lead him to the same tortured end as the victim whom he willed tosave—that I would have done otherwise than hold my tongue and attempt tosti� e my conscience by indifference or forgetfulness[104].
An article in the left wing Reynolds News also referred to the government when it urgedits readers:
When your eye � inches from the pictures now appearing in the Press—theleast horrible of those reaching newspaper of� ces—do not forget the powerfulmen in this country, many still holding positions of political authority, whoplayed their part in making Hitler possible[105].
Taking the same issue from a different perspective, a letter in the Sunday Expressquestioned the responsibility of the British people themselves. The headline, ‘Thebeasts of Europe’, reminded the public that stories of the camps had been circulated forthe past 15 years.
But you never really knew about these horrors until now. Why? Because likethe Germans who live smug and complacent in the towns beside the concen-tration camps you didn’t want to know … You didn’t think it was any businessof yours.
The writer continued astutely:
I refuse to accept … that these iniquities are the work merely of a small sectionof the German nation. The ordinary German industrial � rms made andprobably even designed the electrical torture implements which are almost astandard � tment in every Gestapo torture chamber. You can usually see themakers’ name stamped on them[106].
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Articles like this which questioned the culpability of the British public or governmentwere however, very rare compared to those that dealt with what was seen as the glaringguilt of the German nation. This inevitably also led to discussion of how the Germanpeople should be taught the lesson of their barbarity, so that it could never happenagain.
A letter in The Times is typical of the views of people who felt that the Germanpopulation as a whole should be shown the photographs and � lms that had been takenof the camps, indicating in an oblique way the dramatic impact that the images had onthe British population.
It is within the power of the Allies to make these loathsome sights known toa large section of the German youth—and it is these that count most in thefuture—by compelling all … to view the � lms which have no doubt been takenof these sadistic cruelties perpetrated by their Nazi leaders[107].
At the end of a series of such letters there was a note reading ‘Many other readersmake this suggestion’. A member of the Parliamentary delegation, Earl Stanhope, whilesupporting the call for as many Germans as possible to visit the camps in person, ‘…did not think it was practicable … they should be compelled to see � lms of them’.[108]There were also reports which indicated that photographs were a powerful mediumwith which to target the German people. An article from Dachau recorded that crowdsquickly gathered round boards which publicly displayed the pictures and expressedtheir horror.
To the question: ‘Do you think these pictures are mere propaganda?’ allreplied ‘No’, but all added, ‘We never knew such things went on’[109].
Not all viewers of the � lms were so receptive. A photograph in the Illustrated LondonNews shows two young girls watching the � lm by themselves for a second time with theaccompanying description; ‘These two German girls, after witnessing the horrors of theconcentration camp � lms, came out laughing. They were sent back to see the � lmsagain!’[110].
It was, however, not just the German population that viewed these � lms. The Britishpublic were not forced to see the � lms, but the majority of the population did see thefootage either as a newsreel item at the beginning of a � lm, or at one of the specialshowings that were staged. When the � lms went on general release there was consider-able debate about whether children should see the � lms or not and also about theethicality of showing such � lms before a light hearted entertainment � lm. The DailyExpress also staged an exhibition of a collection of photographs from the camps, whichagain was visited by large numbers of people and induced a similarly powerful response.
The Newsreels
The newsreel companies faced a major problem in dealing with the footage of thecamps. Newsreels, lasting about 10 minutes, were shown at the beginning of the maincinema programme. As a result, people went to the cinema to see an entertaining � lmand not speci� cally the newsreels themselves[111]. However, a story as horri� c as thatof the liberation of the camps was not something that the newsreels had had to dealwith before. There was an inherent problem about how to handle people who had goneto see a popular � lm at the cinema and were then confronted with shocking scenes fromthe camps. There was the added consideration that they might be accompanied by theirchildren; if there was no warning, the shock of the revelations would be enormous and
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out of place. This raises the whole spectre of placing the Holocaust within an entertain-ment setting. If people watched the newsreel story, would they then want to stay andenjoy the light-hearted programme that followed? If they did so, was it not nullifying allthat the story of the camps represented? However, if the newsreels did not carry thestory, then they were not ful� lling their role of providing a wide audience with accuratenews.
The newsreels provided an accessible format for news, so although newspapers hada much larger audience the newsreels had the potential to reach those who might notread the newspapers closely. In the speci� c context of the camps, the newsreel footagewas particularly graphic. The images depicted the emaciated state of the inmates, theblank staring eyes, the charred remains of corpses at Gardelegen, the obvious distressof visitors to the camps and the corpses which littered the ground of the camps. Theywere powerful, shocking and moving images, which could not be ignored whenpresented on the cinema screen.
At this time there were � ve major newsreel companies, Movietone News, Gaumont–British, Paramount News, Universal and Pathe. All became involved with the screeningof the story of the camps. The initial reactions of their principals were varied[112]. Thenewsreel company principals met regularly in order to discuss sensitive topics andthereby avoid controversy. Paul Smith argued that this:
… accounts for much of the banality of so much newsreel footage, for the verystructure of the newsreel industry committed that medium to emphasiseconsensus rather than con� ict[113].
However, the companies did not settle for banality with the story of the camps. Incontrast, the companies took the unusual decision to alter the standard practise ofrunning two separate news stories per week; instead the story of the camps was reissuedin the same week and therefore received double the exposure. An article in the DailyHerald also revealed that:
The Ministry of Information has responded to the appeals of producers bygiving them an increased allowance of � lm. The newsreels this week will beappreciably longer than usual[114].
The Movietone commentaries also carried the further justi� cation that these were:
Grim pictures, but it’s about time to dispel once and for all, any lingeringdoubt in anyone’s mind about the truth of the things Germany has done. Onlyif all of us know the facts, can we hope to prevent their repetition in thefuture[115].
The newsreel companies used a collective pool of footage from the camps and thesites of other atrocities. However, their coverage remained individual in respect of howthey used this material and particularly in the commentaries that accompanied thepictures. For example, Gaumont–British used an extract from a speech by Churchillwhich highlighted the fact that the same could have happened in Britain if a Germaninvasion had been successful[116]. British Movietone News, on the other hand, useda speech by the American congresswoman Clare Booth-Luce to emphasise the authen-ticity of the camps and the footage that was being shown[117]. Paramount Newsdecided to let the pictures speak for themselves and added no speeches from otherdignitaries, but lingered on close ups of Kramer and the corpses in Belsen[118].
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Despite these variations in style, certain images still appeared regularly in all thenewsreels, further re� ecting some of the themes which had been evident throughout theearlier coverage of the AFRU and the newspapers.
The question of authenticity had already been raised as an issue by the principals ofthe newsreel companies and to some extent this explains why the images were againlargely focused on the delegation of MPs actually visiting the camps. The newsreelsshowed the MPs talking to a group of prisoners in Buchenwald, who have been givenblankets and rehoused in a room with windows. The prisoners still sit or lie on the � oor;the space is very crowded. Their gaunt faces make their eyes appear much larger, andalthough they are clearly talking with the MPs, they stare blankly when the camerafocuses on them. The � lms also showed a cart-load of bodies in the yard at Buchenwaldand a wooden club which was used to beat prisoners. While viewing these sights thecamera focuses on Mavis Tafe, whose face clearly expresses her distress. She holdssmelling salts to her nose as she passes the camera, looks up brie� y and then passes on.These images clearly establish the MPs in the camp, clearly show them talking toemaciated � gures, and looking at innumerable corpses scattered throughout the camp.They also demonstrate their reaction to such sights.
Having established this proof, the newsreels then tended to move on to show imagesof Belsen which did not include pictures of visiting of� cials. One of the most commonimages is that of a woman who walks past the camera, while in the foreground corpseslie on the edge of the path. The woman does not even glance at the bodies, giving aclear expression of how inured inmates were to the close proximity of death. An imagewhich was used by both Paramount and Gaumont–British was that of two young boyswho shared a bowl of soup while glancing at the camera. They are clearly emaciatedand huddle round the bowl as if to protect it from the cameraman. The single imagegraphically illustrates the fact that there were children within the camps and emphasisesto the audience the innocence and youth of some of the victims[119]. Both � lms alsoended with a general view of Belsen which shows ‘… piles of dead bodies strewn over,� eld’[120]. The same image is used to close the Gaumont–British � lm while ‘O GodOur Help in Ages Past’ is heard in voice over to continuing repeats of further imagesof Belsen.
One image, which inevitably featured in all the newsreel footage of Belsen, was theface of Josef Kramer. The pictures which accompanied the commentary showedKramer under the guard of British soldiers. The camera dwells on his face for a fewseconds before moving to the corpses which lie nearby. The Paramount, Gaumont andMovietone footage also included pictures of the SS guards, both men and women, linedup under the guard of British troops. Little comment is made about them, but theymake an immediate and striking contrast with the inmates. The guards are clearly wellfed, healthy and well dressed. They walk out of their barracks purposefully and briskly,unlike the tottering, wandering gait which the inmates use. The guards regard thecamera openly and de� antly instead of gazing at it blankly. When these images arejuxtaposed with those of the inmates they require no further comment.
There is one particular Belsen inmate who appears in all the newsreel footage. He ispictured amid a pile of rags and corpses, half naked while he searches the shirt that heholds for lice. He looks up at the camera but hardly seems to register that it is there,let alone what it is. Movietone describes him as a ‘Prisoner—just a skeleton sits downhandling garment’[121]. Paramount points him out as a ‘… living skeleton among deadbodies’[122] Gaumont commented that he was indistinguishable from the corpseswhich surrounded him[123]. This one powerful image of a man closer to death than
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life, who probably did not survive for long after these pictures were taken, encapsulatesthe tragedy of liberation for many of these inmates for whom it came too late.
The newsreels did not simply restrict themselves to Buchenwald and Belsen. Theyalso showed the effects of an atrocity at Stalag Tekla, close to Leipzig, where once againthe Germans tricked their prisoners and destroyed them with � re. The twisted, charredremains, almost unrecognisable as human corpses, are dwelt on by the camera forseveral seconds, demonstrating how those that tried to escape perished on the electricfences. It is a graphic exposure and it is interesting that the story then shifts toGardelegen, infamous for a similar massacre. This time, however, there is evidence ofAllied justice in action, as a huge party of male civilians are marched out carryingshovels with which to disinter and bury the dead properly. Paramount and Gaumontalso showed a scene where former prisoners are seen attacking one of their formerguards and smashing the windows of a building. The image provides a clear sense ofretribution, but it is strangely detached from the pictures of inmates still in the campswho seem incapable of doing anything so physically demanding.
Horror in Our Time was the only � lm to show the formal burial of a Russian soldier.His fellow soldiers are followed as they gravely carry his plain, rough, wooden, opencof� n to be solemnly buried. The commentary records that this is the � rst proper burialfor a Russian prisoner of war. Both Gaumont and Paramount showed the link up of theRussian and American armies. Both these companies were keen to place the discoveryof the camps within the context of the advance through Europe, as if to emphasise thatsuch things could no longer persist or happen again. Horror in Our Time containsfootage from the Battle of Britain which follows the speech by Churchill, forcefullyreminding the public that if the battle had been lost, then Britain would also have beenexposed to such a fate.
Gaumont and Paramount also included the battle for Leipzig in their � lms. It showshappy citizens cheering the incoming troops, before switching to tanks and soldiers� ring in the streets against an unseen enemy. The citizens are then contrasted to theMayor of Leipzig, his wife and daughter, who committed suicide with cyanide at theapproach of the Allies. However, a sad postscript accompanies the Gaumont footage;their cameraman was killed shortly after taking the pictures. This once again serves tounderline the point that the camps were situated close to the front line. This is furtherillustrated in the Paramount story which shows a hospital truck at Belsen which hasbullet holes in its side after being strafed by German aircraft.
The individual newsreels inevitably contained their own idiosyncrasies. There wereimages that appeared in one but not others, while some images appeared in all of them,but there were also identi� able themes that ran through all of the different productions.The question of establishing authenticity was primary and the parliamentary delegationserved this purpose well. The use of children to emphasise the innocent nature of thevictims was a clear way of exposing the extent of the cruelty. This was emphasisedfurther by showing the furnaces which were clearly intended to dispose of humanbodies. The nature of the men and women who in� icted this suffering, and the role theAllied army played in forcing German civilians to witness and atone for this suffering,are both prominent themes. In addition all the newsreels showed former inmatesventing some of their anger at former guards. The newsreels then placed the campswithin the context of ongoing war. To end the horri� c revelations, the � lms lingered ongraphic images of the horror, either the scattered piles of corpses in Belsen, or theemaciated inmate on the point of death turning over rags in his hands. The overallimpact was undoubtedly shocking and left the audience in little doubt as to what the
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camps were all about and the extent to which it was possible for the human race to sinkinto barbarity.
The commentaries to the newsreels obviously had a great in� uence on the tone andmessage of the newsreel presentations as a whole. All the commentaries began to raisethe issue of responsibility and again the question of the guilt of the German nation asa whole was raised in the national press. Movietone used the American Congress-woman Clare Booth-Luce to make precisely this point:
I have seen at Buchenwald how men were tortured, gassed, burned and slowlystarved to death … The responsibility for those terrible crimes … falls squarelyon the German people that have long born their responsibility in the eyes ofGod. They must be made now to bear it in the eyes of their fellow men[124].
A British news supplement, made by Movietone, for occupied territories used theBritish MP Mavis Tate, who had already been photographed in the camps, as acommentator. She began by saying that no words could exaggerate the reality of thecamps. A voice-over then continued:
Germany’s crimes are no longer hidden from sight. At last the eyes of theworld are opened. We believe it our duty to screen these pictures as a warningto future generations[125].
It is interesting to note that this commentary implies that the outside world hadknown nothing of these events before now. The same thing is suggested in thecommentary for Horror in Our Time, which claims that the atrocities have been hiddenbehind barbed wire for the last � ve years, but now they have been exposed. There is noindication that the British government or public might have had an inkling of the truth.In contrast, the Movietone commentary states clearly:
None of these atrocities are new; all this has been going on for years; what isnew is the stark evidence; widely and openly presented in this country … nowwe see the incontestable truth—and truth has to be faced[126].
This seems to imply that there had been some knowledge previously, and it is now thescale of the atrocities, rather than their existence, which is so shocking.
This comment, however, also begins to shift the emphasis to the British public itself.It is now their responsibility to accept and learn from these pictures. A telling commentfrom Mavis Tate, which accompanied a picture of British soldiers entering a camp,said:
It is these men who so strongly advocate the publication of these pictures,which show only in small part what they see in reality[127].
The message was clear that the public had an obligation to remember the lesson of thecamps. However, Movietone added:
Can anyone, any longer, doubt the truth of German atrocities? And yet shallwe remember these things in 10, 15, 20 years time[128]?
Another aspect which stands out in Mavis Tate’s commentary is the fact that shespeci� cally says the inmates are ‘as you and I’. In the same way as Monson in theEvening Standard had illustrated the humanity of the people who appeared barelyrecognisable as humans, Mavis Tate now attempted to do the same. She mentionedthat the inmates were of many different nationalities, but then added that many of themwere intellectual and highly gifted men and women. She identi� ed them as engineersand doctors, responsible, intelligent, citizens ‘as you and I’[129]. It is a powerful
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Horror in Our Time 243
reminder to the audience of how fragile the trappings of civilisation really are whenchallenged. It also con� rms, in a different way, Churchill’s assertion that the samepersecution really could have taken place in Britain.
The newsreel companies also put together footage which was sponsored by theBritish government. These features were known as War Pictorial News, and wereproduced in Cairo before being distributed abroad as a compilation of the main storiesthat had been shown in Britain. Within these programmes the camps tended to befeatured as a prominent story, but unlike the newsreels that were shown in Britain, noadditional space was cleared and the story of the camps was simply included within allthe other stories that had been current during that week. As a result the story of thecamps became obscured by images of Ethiopian troops celebrating victory in EastAfrica, or the return of Greek refugees to their homes. However, the footage that iscontained within these � lms is just as graphic as that shown to the British public, andthe commentaries dwelt on many of the same themes.
The same footage was also used in programmes which were compiled for distributionthroughout Germany. Inevitably the commentaries for these � lms focused on present-ing the German population with irrefutable evidence of the atrocities that had beencommitted in their name. As a result, the footage shown in Germany tended to bemuch more graphic than the images shown in Britain; similarly, the commentaries forthese � lms tended to be more hard hitting, allowing for no ambiguity.
The newsreels had continued the process of telling the story of the camps, usingmany of the images that had been collected by the AFPU in the � rst few days ofliberation. But the results of all this work and commitment ultimately rested with theBritish public. How would they respond to the horri� c images which now confrontedthem in places they had previously viewed as being for entertainment?
The Public’s Response
The British public were shocked, horri� ed and troubled by the images that confrontedthem. They were seeing images which no-one had ever thought they would see, andthere was no precedent for how they should respond. In this respect, the opinionswhich the public expressed tended to be very guileless, their initial reaction, rather thanthe response that they thought was expected of them. The pictures and � lms that theysaw drew many comments about the power of the images, but also about whether theyshould really be shown. There was also the question of whether the public wouldbecome so swamped with horri� c pictures that they would stop responding to them.
The Daily Express circumvented the problem of how much to show in their paper, bystaging an exhibition of many of the photographs that they had received. Some of thesehad already been printed in the newspapers; others had been considered too shocking.The Sunday Express instructed that ‘… children will not be admitted’. But ‘Every adultcitizen should see these pictures’.[130] Mass Observation covered the responses of theaudience that visited the exhibition and the results are intriguing. Meanwhile thenewspapers carried reports about the queues which formed to see the � lm Horror in OurTime and letters which indicated the public’s response. Questions were asked in theHouse of Commons and there were reports of prominent � gures who went to see the� lms and their response to them.
The prominence that the story of the camps had been given by the newspapers andthe powerful effect that it had upon the public are evident from the � rst words of theMass Observation report. The introduction reads:
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The news of the German concentration camps has made a very profoundimpression. Not only had everyone who was questioned heard about them—generally on questions of topical news there is a large ‘Don’t know’ section—but many people came out with spontaneous comment, which showed howdeeply horri� ed they had been by the news that they had heard[131].
This contrasts sharply with the results of a survey carried out in December 1944 whenonly 37% of the people interviewed felt that the atrocity stories were unequivocally true.The resulting � gures indicate quite clearly the change in the general attitude of thepublic.
One person who was interviewed made the important point: ‘I knew they were true.But seeing the pictures of them makes a great difference.’ Once again it is the subtledistinction between knowledge and belief that is being identi� ed. People did not doubtthe truth of the stories before, but the overwhelming evidence presented by the newscoverage and the impact of horri� c pictures meant that the whole issue was nowunderstood and believed in a way that it had not been before. Two other people added:
At one time I thought some of them were made up, just to make us hate theGermans. Now I think they’re true enough.
I used to think maybe they were partly false but now I think they’re trueenough[132].
It is interesting that the � rst of the two referred to the suspicion that the previousstories were clumsy government propaganda. To a certain extent this does addcredibility to the government’s assertion that to release atrocity reports would simplylead to scepticism among the public. However, the study also quotes a handful ofpeople who even now were sceptical. They commented ‘Well I should say they wereexaggerated a bit sometimes,’ or I don’t believe half of them’, or ‘I would say partlyfalse’. The survey does point out that these last two are ‘very obvious exceptions’.However, this does make the point very precisely that some people were extremelysceptical and explains why such a heavy emphasis was continually placed on authenti-cating the material.
It should also be borne in mind that this survey was conducted on the same day asthe � rst reports appeared in the newspapers. A second survey was dated 5 May 1945,after there had been a great deal more coverage and following the report of theparliamentary delegation. It was conducted � rst at the entrance to a cinema in Kilburn(North London) which was showing a � lm of the atrocities; second interviews weretaken outside the Daily Express exhibition in Trafalgar Square. The reactions reveal thatpeople were not so much disbelieving as questioning of the government’s role and also
Male Female Average % 1:12:44
True 73 90 81 37Partly 21 10 16 29False 6 3 11No opinion 23
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that people were beginning to feel overwhelmed by the images that confrontedthem.[133] One woman explained to the interviewer:
‘It made me feel sick and angry.’
Inv: ‘Why angry?’
‘Because I feel we could have prevented a lot of it. I feel our government musthave known all about it … Savages wouldn’t behave that way, yet theGermans are supposed to be a civilised race. What I can’t understand is whywe send missionaries out to Africa and such places to civilise tribes, whenwe’ve got such a lot to learn from them’[134].
The most striking comment comes from an interviewee who said:
I think it’s been rather an unfair trick of the government to have fastened onthese horror camps like this. I don’t say that it wasn’t a dreadful thing, but Ido think they should tell us the other side of the picture—the dreadfuldisorganisation of Germany during the last few months … Well I ask you,would the Germans deliberately establish focal points of dysentery and typhusall over Germany if they could avoid it? They know as well as we do that itcan’t be con� ned to the camps once it has broken out … I don’t say they wererun like the Ritz before all this, but I do think it’s a gross misrepresentation tosuggest that the prisoners have been treated like that all along, deliberately; itjust isn’t sense. As for the pictures of thin, starving people, dead and alive—Well, dysentery and typhus are wasting diseases, and anyone suffering fromadvanced stages of them will look like that …[135]
This particular interviewee does seem to be edging towards disbelief of the stories,despite his earlier assertion that he does believe the stories. His comments highlight thewhole incomprehensibility of the camps. As the man suggests, it was totally illogicalthat the Germans would establish areas of disease close to centres of population. He isalso correct in saying that conditions had deteriorated towards the end of the war. Atthe same time this opinion disregards the vast numbers of dead that were found in thecamps and the impact of the mass evacuations from the eastern camps. Once again itunderlines the fact that although the evidence of the camps was laid bare it was still aninherently dif� cult story to understand and believe. People’s natural reaction was tothink these things could not possibly happen in a civilised country and it was thisimmediate revulsion which was so hard to overcome in some people and so feared bythose who originally produced the images.
There were also people who commented on the fact that they felt they had really seenenough. As one woman clearly explained:
I’m beginning to get fed up with all these pictures in the papers … I was ashorri� ed as anyone at the beginning, but honestly, you can’t keep on feelingemotional about it. I do think they’ve overdone it. I certainly shan’t go and seethe � lm. I don’t think it would mean anything to me now. I feel quitehardened … you just get used to it. Just as we’ve had to get used to the ideaof death all through the war[136].
Another woman admitted:
… I kept turning away—it was so horrible, I just couldn’t go on looking. ButI didn’t feel pity or the sort of righteous horror you are supposed to feel. I justfelt disgusted. Not even with the Germans, but with the people themselves.
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They looked so horrible and disgusting—their cracked faces, and their skinni-ness and sloppiness and horribleness. I know I shouldn’t have felt likethat …[137].
These observations clearly expose why there was a real danger that people couldbecome indifferent to the images that they were exposed to. It also underlines exactlywhy the AFPU, newspaper reports and newsreels had focused on the humanity of theinmates. Mavis Tate’s comment ‘as you and I’ comes to mind while reading theattitude of the second woman. It also indicates that there was a danger in emphasisingthe inmates as helpless victims, because people tended to question why they made noattempt to help themselves. Once again it is a question of knowledge; if people did notreally understand the nature of the camps, as it was dif� cult for them to do with theinformation available, then it was hard to accept the extent of the suffering and hard toidentify with victims.
The power of speci� c images is highlighted by one woman who was interviewed.Having expressed the opinion that she distrusted the government’s role she went on tosay:
They say it’s the fault of all the German people, I don’t know, but if it is, whatgood does it do to show it on the pictures like that? It doesn’t help those poordevils any. And why did they have to repeat it? They did, you know, the worstshots, the living skeleton one[138].
It is impossible to prove, but it would be logical to suggest that the image that thewoman refers to is that of the man searching through his clothes.[139] As has alreadybeen explained this � gure appeared prominently in all the newsreels and remains apowerful and de� ning image of the camps. However, it is signi� cant that this view wasexpressed in a negative context and again raises the problem that some of the mostpowerful indictments of the camps could induce revulsion and disbelief in theirintended audience.
The survey does admit that these views are atypical, but they were clearly expressedopinions. More importantly, the aim of those who created the record of the camps wasthat they should convince those who might doubt the images rather than target thosewho would believe the story with little scepticism. It is signi� cant that the majority wereconvinced; however, it is also an indication that there were some doubters and theirscepticism is an element that still remains with some of the public today, despite thebest efforts of those who made the record of the camps.
The effect of the Daily Express exhibition on its audience was profound. The MassObservation investigator recorded that people ‘… � le past in horri� ed silence’. Somepeople admitted that they ‘… couldn’t bear to look at them’ and ‘I feel perfectly sick.I couldn’t look at more than half’[140]. However, in some cases the extent of the horrorhad the more positive effect of inducing a desire to learn from the experience.‘Dreadful. They should show it to the whole world so that such measures of cruelty willnever be forgotten; every man woman and child should see it …’ Another manadmitted: ‘… I hated seeing it, at the same time I’m glad I did. I only hope theexhibition is shown in every town and village’[141].
An additional and signi� cant fact recorded by the investigator was that, of all thepeople interviewed or overheard talking, only two expressed even the slightest doubtthat the pictures represented the truth. This in itself provides an interesting re� ectionon the title of the exhibition, ‘Seeing is Believing’. This view is further con� rmed by the
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comments of two people who said: ‘I believe it’s true. I can see with my own eyes.Pictures don’t lie’ and ‘They are true. They can’t fake such pictures’[142].
Two women commented that they believed the stories because they had beencon� rmed by British soldiers. It is signi� cant that this direct contact with people whocould con� rm the reality of the camps was commented on. It underlines the power ofplacing recognisable people like British soldiers within the context of the camps. It alsoemphasises the wisdom shown by Eisenhower and others when they advocated that asmany of� cial people as possible, including soldiers, should visit the camps in person inorder to verify the reports. By encouraging as many eye witnesses as possible to visit thecamps, it was assured that the story would be more widely spread. At the same timethese people would also defend the validity of the camps when greeted by people whowere more sceptical. It was an experience that no-one could forget and they wouldundoubtedly make sure that others were convinced of its veracity.
This does once again raise the question of why the camps were believed now, whenearlier reports had aroused a fairly negligible response. The survey asked how muchpeople had known about the camps before the present � ood of information. The resultis interesting; of the 15 people asked, only two had heard of the camps for the � rst timeafter they had been liberated. At least six people commented that they had heard aboutthe camps from the beginning of the war or earlier. One added ‘I heard about it longago—back in 1935–1936’[143].
However, when asked whether they had known what they were really like before now,only two of the 13 people who had heard about the camps answered that they hadunderstood their true meaning. Of these two, one man answered that he had knownbecause of the ‘the people I’d rubbed against’[144]. This again suggests that personalcontact with the people who had witnessed the camps made a difference to what peoplebelieved. But further responses reveal that this was not always the case: ‘I’d heard fromdifferent people even before the war started that they did such dreadful things … butno English person can imagine human beings would resort to such acts of barbarity.’Another man answered: ‘I had a friend who was a Czech, but even then I doubted it.’
This is quite a damning indictment of how sceptical people were and the level ofdoubt that had to be overcome, but once again it conveys the impression that mostpeople were sceptical because they could not conceive of such horri� c cruelty. Nowheredoes anyone say that they were previously sceptical because they thought the reportswere atrocity propaganda or Jewish stories. It has to be added that this survey wasconducted with too small a sample to make such a generalisation. However, it is still asigni� cant indication of how a small cross-section of society did view the presentationof the story of the concentration camps and some of the most powerful images to comeout of the camps.
Public Response to the Newsreels
The fact that the Daily Express exhibition was adamantly out of bounds to childrenemphasises how concerned people were about the effect that these images could have.Newsreels carried a ‘U’ certi� cate and were therefore open to everyone who wished tosee them, including children. As a result there was considerable debate about how thescreening of footage from the camp should be handled. Several letters in the newspa-pers indicate that many people were of the opinion that warnings should be given thatthese images were not suitable for children. A letter in the Manchester Guardianexpressed the concern felt:
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The desirability of adults seeing these pictures may be argued … My concern,however, is with the children who suddenly see � ashed on the screen picturesof unmitigated horror … if it is not possible under the law to prevent childrenfrom being admitted to performances … surely the local authorities shouldinsist that notices should be clearly displayed stating that these � lms are not� t for children. My own judgement is that children should be excludedentirely[145].
This fear about the impact that these images would have on children who saw theminadvertently was not unfounded. Bernard Crick, 50 years later, remembered that as a15 year old: ‘… we saw the � lm, just spliced in without warning to a routine newsreel,of the opening up of Belsen. We wept in the alley outside’[146].
It was exactly this kind of unsupervised viewing by children that public opinion waskeen to guard against. However, an article in the News Chronicle highlighted one of theproblems:
… children could not be excluded from these showings, for newsreels made byprivate concerns had no certi� cates. News shots made of� cially, however,might be given a ‘horror’ certi� cate should their effect on children be con-sidered too over-powering [197].
If Bernard Crick’s reaction is representative it has to be assumed that these imageswere indeed overpowering, especially for children. A further News Chronicle headlineread: ‘Atrocity � lm may warp children’. This article examined the danger that childrencould be encouraged by the images to become sadistic themselves[148]. In response tothese concerns, most cinemas used notices to warn people of the horri� c nature of thematerial, and others used attendants to warn people as they queued to see them. Anarticle in The Daily Herald carried the headline: ‘Don’t let children see � lm’. Itcontinues:
Cinema attendants walked along the queues outside West End news theatresyesterday warning people with children not to let them see the Buchenwaldand Belsen atrocities � lm. Children who came alone were in most casesturned away … We cannot stop parents bringing their children. But we haveinstructed our staff to warn them of the � lm’s terrible nature.
The audience were, however, unanimous in their opinion:
Show it everywhere. Let every person over the age of sixteen see for them-selves what Buchenwald means[149].
There is a very clear distinction between what people considered children should seeand what they as adults should see. Almost everyone who expressed an opinion believedthat although children should be protected adults had a duty and responsibility to seeand absorb these � lms.
This is further re� ected in an article in the Evening Standard which highlights the factthat the public regarded newsreels which contained footage of the camps as beinginherently different to other newsreel programmes, not least because people went to thecinema speci� cally to see these newsreels, rather then viewing them as an incidentalfeature at the beginning of the cinema programme.
… there was a big crowd as soon as the theatre opened at 10.30. Four out of� ve people went speci� cally to see the � lm. Two out of � ve went away andcame back until the � lm was showing. Three out of � ve left when the � lm was
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over without waiting for the rest of the programme. No one left in the middleof … there was none of the usual chatter from the crowds going out.
The article also indicates that some people felt their children should see the � lms aswell:
Three women came to see if the � lm was suitable for their children; all toldme that if possible they want their children to see it. Only one woman broughther daughter of nine and son of sixteen … She left with her daughter beforethe atrocity � lm began; her son remained specially behind to see it[150].
The Daily Telegraph recorded that ‘All box of� ce records at London news theatresshowing these � lms have been broken’. In view of peoples’ determination to see the� lms it is easy to see why this was the case. The same article detailed the visit of theLord Chancellor, Lord Simon:
He was accompanied by Lady Simon and Mrs Mavis Tate … At the cinemavisited by the Lord Chancellor, queues, including children, elderly women,service men and clergymen, stretched from Charing Cross road into TrafalgarSquare. They were still there late at night. Lord Simon who had made specialreservations for the � lm … As he left immediately after the � lm, he expressedhis horror at what he had seen[151].
It is obvious from these extracts that people were inordinately interested in seeing these� lms, and for whatever reasons they were determined enough to queue for extremelylong periods.
It is a � tting tribute to the work done by the AFPU that the British public didrespond in this positive way to the footage that they had painstakingly gathered. Thisis further underlined by an Evening Standard article which reviewed the newsreel � lmsand carried the headline ‘Steel yourself to see this � lm’:
It is your duty not to spare your feelings, but to see them … Nothing that ourskilled reporters have told us, or the ‘stills’ that have been sent to us hasrevealed the terrible truth so fully and convincingly. For the cameramen whohad to do their duty, and move among the mounds of dead, and the slowlywrithing clusters of living dead, this must have been the most ghastly assign-ment of the war. They have done their work un� inchingly sparing neitherthemselves nor us. Those who still doubt the truth should now be silenced,and those who still hanker after Fascism be shamed [152].
A similar attitude was expressed in Time and Tide, in a review of Horror in Our Time:
Ultimately ‘Horror in Our Time’ is too horrible to write about, but before Igive up trying I should like to praise the moral courage of the cameramen whosteeled themselves to make it and the decent reticence of its commentary. Mymind was too assailed by grief to function critically but I think I am right insaying that some of the worst moments were silent … and I thought the silenceright and sensitive. Yes, cinema has done its most hateful job honourably anddecently and has provided a record for posterity that nothing can ex-punge[153].
One has to think that if the � lms drew responses like this from reviewers, then theAFPU and the newsreel companies had indeed achieved their aim. They had set out topresent the public with images that would be seen as irrefutable proof of unimaginable
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and horri� c scenes. The reaction of the public seems to suggest that they had indeedachieved this primary aim of convincing a sceptical audience.
The newsreels did undoubtedly have a unique role in exposing in graphic imagesexactly what the camps were all about. As one review ended:
These � lms should be shown throughout the world and nowhere more than inGermany. The printed word can glance off an inattentive mind, but themoving picture bites deep into the imagination[154].
The work of the AFPU is unique among the history of the reporting of theconcentration camps. The images that so shocked the British public in 1945 have goneon to shock subsequent generations and have provided an indelible record for theeducation of future generations. Their power rests in their simple evocation of theshocking reality that was the concentration camps, a lasting testament to the horror thatexisted in their time.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Nicholas Hiley and Jerome Kuehl for their assistance.
Correspondence: Hannah Caven, 22 Rose Valley, Norwich, NR2 2PX, UK. E-mail:[email protected]
NOTES
[1] The footage of the concentration camp at Belsen, which was taken by the British Army Film andPhotographic Unit, is now held at the Imperial War Museum, London.
[2] Ian Grant, Cameramen at War (Cambridge, 1980), p. 8.[3] Ibid., p. 17.[4] War Of� ce Assignment No. 907, 10 December 1942, Department of Documents, Imperial War
Museum, London (hereafter, IWM, Dept of Docs).[5] Grant, Cameramen at War, p. 18.[6] Eberhard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen (Hanover, 1962), p. 33.[7] Jon Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust: the liberation of the camps (London, 1990), p. 37.[8] Ibid., p. 40.[9] Ibid., p. 43.
[10] INF 1/636, Figures from the Headquarters of the 12th Army Group; 25 May 1945, Public RecordOf� ce, London (hereafter PRO).
[11] Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust, pp. 57–58.[12] The dope sheets of the Belsen cameramen are held uncatalogued in the Imperial War Museum,
Department of Photographs (hereafter IWM, Dept of Photos).[13] Dope sheet, 26 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[14] Caption for photograph BU 3734, IWM, Dept of Photos.[15] Reel 4833/7 Imperial War Museum, Department of Sound Records (hereafter IWM, Dept of
SR).[16] The Sunday Times, 19 February 1984, p. 5.[17] Leslie H. Hardman, The Survivors: the story of the Belsen remnant (London, 1958), p. 12.[18] Reel 4302/4, IWM, Dept of SR.[19] Martin Gilbert, The Second World War (London, 1989), p. 578.[20] Dope sheet, 16 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[21] John Silverman, The Taste of War: Margaret Bourke-White (London, 1985), p. 263.[22] Dope sheet, 17 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[23] Imperial War Museum, The Relief of Belsen: April 1945, eye witness accounts (London, 1991), p.
6.
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[24] Dope sheet, 16 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[25] Bridgman, The End of the Holocaust, p. 52.[26] Derrick Sington, Belsen Uncovered (London, 1946), p. 25.[27] Reel 4833/7, IWM, Dept of SR.[28] Sington, Belsen Uncovered, pp. 40–41.[29] Hardman, The Survivors, p. 54–55.[30] Reel 7481/2, IWM, Dept of SR.[31] Silverman, The Taste of War, p. 261.[32] Thierenstadt was an unusual camp in Czechoslovakia which was set up as a ‘model’ camp by the
Nazis. One of the features of the camp was that it allowed inmates to engage in artistic pursuitssuch as painting and theatre, which were then shown as examples of the good conditions withinthe camp, to foreign observers. However, most of the inmates were subsequently transported toother, more typical concentration camps, where conditions were much worse.
[33] Alfred Kantor, The Book of Alfred Kantor: an artist’s journal of the holocaust (London, 1987),unpaged introduction.
[34] Dope sheet, 20 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[35] Imperial War Museum, The Relief of Belsen, p. 28.[36] Sunday Express, 17 March 1946, Weiner Library Cuttings Collection.[37] Picture BU 3722, IWM, Dept of Photos.[38] Dope sheet, 17 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[39] Letter from Sergeant Midgeley, 18 April 1945, p. 13, IWM, Dept of Docs.[40] Dope sheet, 18 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Docs.[41] Sergeant Midgeley, pp. 10–11, IWM, Dept of Docs.[42] Hardman, The Survivors, p. 16.[43] Imperial War Museum, The Relief of Belsen, p. 20.[44] Hardman, The Survivors, p. 31.[45] Correspondence from Leslie Cole attached to drawing LD5105 ‘SS guards collecting bodies’
Imperial War Museum, Department of Art (hereafter IWM, Dept of Art).[46] Dope sheet, 24 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[47] Caption for photograph BU 4262, IWM, Dept of Photos.[48] Dope sheet, 24 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[49] Leslie Cole correspondence attached to drawing LD 5104 ‘Belsen camp—camp for women’,
IWM, Dept of Art.[50] Imperial War Musuem, The Relief of Belsen, p. 7.[51] Ibid., p. 16.[52] Ibid., p. 22.[53] Ibid., pp. 23–29.[54] Caption for photograph BU 7802, IWM, Dept of Photos.[55] Dope sheet, 22 April 1945, and caption for photograph BU 4237, IWM, Dept of Photos.[56] LD 5468, ‘The laundry’, IWM, Dept of Art.[57] Dope sheet, 22 April 1945, and see Fig. 5.[58] Caption for photograph BU 6368, IWM, Dept of Photos.[59] Dope sheet, 27 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[60] Caption for photograph BU 4841, IWM, Dept of Photos.[61] Dope sheet, 18 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[62] Reel 7481/2 and 4304, IWM, Dept of SR.[63] War Report: a record of dispatches broadcast by the BBC’s war correspondents with the Allied
Expeditionary Force (Oxford, 1946), p. 402.[64] Dope sheet, 18 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[65] Caption for photograph BU 4002 (xc) and dope sheet, 17 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[66] Caption for photograph BU 4002, IWM, Dept of Photos.[67] Dope sheet, 17 April 1945, IWM, Dept of Photos.[68] John Taylor, War Photography: realism in the British press (London, 1991), p. 63.[69] L. Mial (ed.), Richard Dimbleby Broadcaster (London, 1966), p. 47.[70] Jonathan Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby, A Biography (London, 1976), p. 194.[71] PRO: INF 1/636 Letter from Mr Adams, 11 April 1945. Mr Cummins was the editor of British
Paramount News while Sir Gordon Craig and Mr Sanger represented British Movietone News.[72] Jean Seaton, The BBC and the Holocaust, European Journal of Communication, 2 (1987), p. 56.
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[73] HRM Short and Stephen Dolezel, Hitler’s Fall: the newsreel witness (London, 1988), p. 35.[74] PRO: INF 1/251 Part 4; 25 July 1941, Plan to combat the apathetic outlook of ‘What have I got
to lose even if Germany wins?’[75] The Mass Observation Archive is a rather idiosyncratic collection of public opinion polls. The
archive contains some reports which were the result of questionnaires; however, some of thematerial collected comes from the personal reports of ‘observers’ who overheard conversations,or recorded diaries on their own and others’ activities.
[76] D5173, 31 October 1939, Mass Observation Archive, Sussex University (hereafter MOA).[77] MOA, D5276, 3 November 1939.[78] Manchester Guardian, 6 November 1939, letters.[79] PRO: INF 1/251 Part 4, 25 July 1941, Plan to combat the apathetic outlook of ‘What have I got
to lose even if Germany wins?’[80] Evening Standard, 18 April 1945, p. 3.[81] Evening Standard, 20 April 1945, p. 3.[82] Illustrated London News, 28 April 1945.[83] Evening Standard, 18 April 1945, p. 3.[84] Daily Telegraph, 21 April 1945, front page.[85] Illustrated London News, 28 April 1945.[86] The News Chronicle, 3 May 1945, p. 3.[87] Evening Standard, 18 April 1945, p. 3; Illustrated London News, 14 April 1945.[88] Evening Standard, 20 April 1945, front page.[89] Evening Standard, 20 April 1945, p. 3.[90] Evening Standard, 21 April 1945, pp. 3–4. The picture, termed ‘the living skeleton’, is one of the
most frequently recurring images in the British newspaper reporting, and was particularlycommon in the newsreels as well. See Fig. 13.
[91] Evening Standard, 23 April 1945, front page and p. 4.[92] Evening Standard, 23 April 1945, p. 3 (also see Figs 6 and 7).[93] Evening Standard, 24 April 1945, p. 3.[94] Time and Tide, 19 May 1945, pp. 412–413.[95] The Times, 20 April 1945, p. 4.[96] New York Times, 22 April 1945, p. 13.[97] Martin Gilbert, W.S. Churchill Volume II: the road of victory 1941–1945 (London, 1989), pp.
1302–1305.[98] Quoted in Sunday Telegraph, 15 January 1995, p. 19.[99] The Times, 6 June 1947, p. 6.
[100] The Times, 28 April 1945, p. 2.[101] Daily Telegraph, 28 April 1945, pp. 2–3.[102] Oxford Mail, 20 April 1945; Weiner Library Cuttings Collection.[103] Manchester Guardian, 26 April 1945, p. 8.[104] Time and Tide, 9 June 1945, letters.[105] Reynolds News, 22 April 1945; Weiner Library Cuttings Collection.[106] Sunday Express, 22 April 1945; Weiner Library Cuttings Collection.[107] The Times, 23 April 1945, letters.[108] Manchester Guardian, 2 May 1945, p. 6.[109] Manchester Guardian, 26 May 1945, p. 5.[110] Illustrated London News, 16 June 1945.[111] Jerry Kuehl, Film as evidence—a review, History Workshop, 2 (Autumn 1976), pp. 135–139.[112] I have viewed the material produced by Movietone, Gaumont and Paramount. However, the
Universal newsreels of the camps are part of the sequence that was not transferred to archives.I have been unable to see the Pathe footage, but there is no reason to suspect that it differsgreatly from the material produced by the other companies, because it all came from a commonpool of footage.
[113] Paul Smith, The Historian and Film (Cambridge, 1976), p. 60.[114] Daily Herald, 28 April 1945.[115] Movietone Film Library, Atrocities—the evidence, index card and commentary.[116] Reuters Film Library, Gaumont–British News, Horror in Our Time, Issue 1181, released 30 April
1945.[117] British Film Institute, British Movietone News, Atrocities—the evidence, Issue 830 and 830a,
released 30 April 1945.
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[118] Reuters Film Library, Paramount News, Proof Positive, Issue 1478, released 30 April 1945.[119] Paramount News, Proof Positive, indicated on card number 2.[120] Paramount News, Proof Positive, indicated on card number 3.[121] Movietone Film Library, Atrocities—the evidence, index card commentary.[122] Reuters Film Library, Proof Positive, index card commentary.[123] Reuters Film Library, Gaumont–British, Horror in Our Time. See also Fig. 13.[124] Movietone Film Library, Atrocities—the evidence, index card commentary.[125] British Film Institute, British News Supplement for the Occupied Territories.[126] Movietone Film Library, Atrocities—the evidence, index card commentary.[127] British Film Institute, British News Supplement for the Occupied Territories.[128] Movietone Film Library, Atrocities—the evidence, index card commentary.[129] British Film Institute, British News Supplement for the Occupied Territories.[130] Sunday Express, 129 April 1945; Weiner Library Cuttings Collection.[131] Mass Observation Archive, 1 FR 2228.[132] MOA, FR2228, pp. 17–18.[133] MOA, FR2248.[134] MOA, FR2248, p. 1.[135] MOA, FR2248, pp. 1–2.[136] MOA, FR2248, p. 2.[137] MOA, FR2248, p. 2.[138] MOA, FR2248, p. 3.[139] See, Fig. 13.[140] MOA, FR2248, p. 4.[141] MOA, FR2248, p. 5.[142] MOA, FR2248, p. 6.[143] MOA, FR2248, p. 8.[144] MOA, FR2248, p. 9.[145] Manchester Guardian, 4 May 1945, p. 4.[146] The Independent, 15 April 1995, p. 15.[147] News Chronicle, 26 April 1945.[148] News Chronicle, 3 May 1945.[149] Daily Herald, 30 April 1945.[150] Evening Standard, 30 April 1945, p. 5.[151] Daily Telegraph, 1 May 1945, p. 3.[152] Evening Standard, 28 April 1945, p. 6.[153] Time and Tide, 5 May 1945.[154] The Times, 1 May 1945, p. 8.
Hannah Caven is a producer for Two Four Productions, an independent television company. This article isbased on a thesis submitted for an MPhil in Historical Studies at Cambridge University. Caven began workon this topic for her BA in history at Newnham College, Cambridge.
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