The recently completed film has begun making the rounds, and held its New York premiere Tuesday<\/span><\/span> night at Manhattan\u2019s Museum of Jewish Heritage-A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.<\/p>\n \u201cGerman Concentration Camps\u201d draws heavily on the footage taken at Bergen-Belsen, Auschwitz and Dachau by combat and newsreel cameramen in the\u00a0weeks after liberation. It shows those who had managed to survive gas chambers, typhus epidemics and starvation conditions taking the first steps toward rebuilding their lives. They are deloused. They get hot showers for the first time in years and hot meals. There are piles of clean clothes, and women rejoicing in trying on the donated dresses, pumps and wide-brimmed hats.<\/p>\n \u201cSome of the most touching parts show the restoration of what I can only call humanity,\u201d said Jane\u00a0Wells, a documentarian and the daughter of the film\u2019s producer, Sidney Bernstein.<\/p>\n An Englishman, Bernstein led the film division of the Allied forces\u2019 propaganda effort and was tasked with chronicling the Nazi’s crimes for the German public.\u00a0To this end, the\u00a0film includes copious\u00a0footage of former camp guards carrying the dead bodies of their victims\u00a0to mass graves and tossing them, with callous disregard, into the giant pits.<\/p>\n Bernstein\u00a0enlisted\u00a0Hitchcock, a close friend, as the film\u2019s treatment adviser.\u00a0Hitchcock’s\u00a0influence can be seen in the long, panning shots that\u00a0leave no room for doubt that what the audience is seeing is no fabrication. Bernstein and his team worked on the film through the spring and summer of 1945.<\/p>\n But by later that year,\u00a0many Germans had toured the concentration camps and seen newsreels of what had happened there. There was a sense that the film\u2019s time had passed, and the British government shelved the project.<\/p>\n In recent years, however, Britain\u2019s\u00a0Imperial War Museum<\/a>\u00a0restored the footage and set out to finish the film using the original script and shot sheet. The words are lyrical (\u201cThey say a dead man\u2019s boots bring bad luck; what of dead children\u2019s toys?\u201d) and they are judgmental. (\u201cGermans knew about Dachau but did not care.\u201d)<\/p>\n Hewing to the original vision meant making a film that contained some factual inaccuracies (the number of dead) and omissions (about whom the Nazis targeted).<\/p>\n \u201cIt didn\u2019t emphasize how disproportionately the Jews had suffered,\u201d Wells said of the film, which refers to victims by their nationality rather than their religion. \u201cIt showed it as more of a universal Holocaust than one that was predominantly Jewish.\u201d (In a short film\u00a0that follows the documentary and attempts to correct the record, scholars surmise that the filmmakers did not want to portray Jews as a people apart.)<\/p>\n An HBO documentary about the long-delayed Hitchcock project,\u00a0\u201cNight Will Fall,\u201d<\/a>\u00a0premiered in January. The title is a line from “German Concentration Camps”: \u201cUnless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall. But by God\u2019s grace, we who live will learn.\u201d<\/p>\n Bruce Ratner, a real estate developer and a minority owner of the Brooklyn Nets basketball team, was instrumental in bringing the film to the Museum of Jewish Heritage, where he serves as chairman of the board.<\/p>\n![\"Share](\"https:\/\/static.hupso.com\/share\/buttons\/share-medium.png\")