MovieChat Forums > Night Will Fall (2014) Discussion > Concentration camps

Concentration camps

posted 9 years ago by filmflamfilm
2 replies | jump to latest

A concentration camp is generally a prison camp. However, the Nazis also made transit camps, work camps and extermination camps. All of these were also concentration camps.

In Germany itself there were never any extermination camps. The concentration camps at Dachau, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald were, of course, not pleasant places to be, but they were not equipped for industrial murder.

The extermination camps were all in Poland and some of the Baltic states. Poland had the most - Auchwitz-Birkenau, Treblinka and Sobibor, to mention the most notorious.

The camps shown in this film was shot, I believe, only by troops from the western Allies (UK, US, Canada). These show only concentration camps in Germany. The extermination camps in Poland and eastern Europe were liberated by Russian troops. They also took films, but I do not know if these films have ever been publicly released.

Unlike the German camps, I believe most of the extermination camps were emptied before the Russian troops arrived. I know the prisoners of Auschwitz-Birkenau were forced to march to another camp closer or in Germany before the troops arrived. Sobibor was closed and torn down after inmates killed half the Nazi guards and attempted a mass escape in 1943.

[–] ib011f9545i 9 years ago

Having just watched the dvd I have to say you are wrong,the film,which is confusing to watch,contains footage from British,American and Soviet sources.
It was always meant to be a film containing international input but was a British led project.

I say the film is confusing to watch because the film NIGHT MUST FALL is not just a showing of the film that was unfinished in 1945,it also contains interviews with survivors and cameramen who had been filmed or done the filming in 1945.

Now this is a clever idea but it breaks up the shape of the original film,they show the clips from the film in a different frame and say it is from the film CONCENTRATION CAMPS,which was the original title of the original film.

I wish it was possible to watch the raw film without the modern framing,but we need and get a modern framing.

But the raw material is amazing but like a German historians says (in one of the modern extra historical interviews)the film covers what was known in 1945 from a 1945 point of view,so we don't get the explanation that the majority of the victims were jews,because they were jews,it does not explain the historical context of 1945 to people who are not WORLD WAR 2 geeks like I am.

The dvd contains a Soviet film about Auschwitz which is interesting but while that camp was a death camp unlike Dachau or Belsen the footage of these 2 camps,taken by the British and Americans is actually more shocking and graphic than the Soviet films which mainly shows survivors.

[–] filmflamfilm 9 years ago

I have seen the British broadcast, but not the DVD. You say that I am wrong, but not what I am wrong about. And moreover, you are wrong about at least one thing. The original title of the film was "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey."

The point of the original British film was simply to provide documentary evidence of what the Nazis had done. I don't disagree with what you wrote about the German historian, as early evidence of what the Nazis were doing was generally ignored by the western allies (US and UK) as being too unbelievable, which is why there was so much shock when the allies discovered for themselves in 1945 that the early reports were actually true.