Concentration camps; liberation; atrocities

See also Story 2597 and 2598, Film ID 1000 where this film screened in part as a Welt im Film newsreel, issue no. 5.

Film Summary: "F3080" was the name given to a project to compile a documentary film on Nazi atrocities the liberation of the German concentration camps. In 2014, the IWM completed a new restoration of this film, now called"German Concentration Camps Factual Survey." The project originated in February 1945 in the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). Sidney Bernstein, chief of PWD's Film Section, began preparations for producing a film using material shot by the service and newsreel cameramen accompanying the British, American, and Russian armies. As the Allied forces advanced in the final weeks leading up to the German surrender, cameramen of the British Army Film Unit and of the American Army Pictorial Service began to make a systematic record of the newly liberated concentration camps. By early May 1945, the British Ministry of Information and the American Office of War Information began collaborating on the collation and rough-cutting of the film material. During that summer of 1945 some of the editing was done under the direction of Alfred Hitchcock. Five of the film's six reels survived in a 55-minute fine-cut print without titles or credits. In 1952 the five reels, together with an undated, unsigned typed narration which closely matched the edited film, were transferred from the British War Office film vaults to London's Imperial War Museum. IWM gave the film the title "Memory of the Camps." A shot list dated May 7, 1946 suggested that the missing sixth reel comprised Russian film of the liberation of Auschwitz and Majdanek; but this reel had been left in Moscow in the hands of the Russian cameramen who shot it. In May 1985, PBS FRONTLINE added the script and asked the late British actor, Trevor Howard, to record it. The aim was to present the film unedited, as close as possible to what the producers intended in 1945. PBS FRONTLINE broadcast this incomplete version under the title "Memory of the Camps" on television. For more information, reefer to: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/camp/.