When the first concentration camps were liberated in 1945, the Allied cameramen’s assignment was to document the events systematically – a record of the inconceivable. The images they produced were so grim and horrifying that much of what we have seen in this context probably pales in comparison. On the basis of this material, renowned filmmakers like Sidney Bernstein, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder and Stewart McAllister produced a documentary with the revelatory subtitle “No German can say he didn’t know”.
The political agenda of German reconstruction prevented its publication – reels vanished or ended up in archives, where they lay untouched for decades. Now the Imperial War Museum has managed to reconstruct the film almost completely. Supplemented by testimonies of contemporary witnesses, “Night Will Fall” is a haunting reflection of the story of this documentary film and one of the darkest chapters of the 20th century.