Nazi Concentration Camps (1945)
Nazi Concentration Camps (1945)
Nazi Concentration Camps (1945) occupies a category almost entirely its own in the history of documentary film. Running to just under an hour, it was assembled from footage shot by United States military photographers who accompanied Allied forces as they liberated the camps across occupied Europe in the spring of 1945. The material was gathered on the direct orders of General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Supreme Commander of Allied Forces, who had the foresight, or perhaps the grim pragmatism, to understand that visual evidence would be needed when the time came to hold people to account. That time came sooner than anyone might have imagined. The film was presented as prosecutorial evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, forming part of the case against Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders in proceedings that began in late 1945. It is, in the most literal documentary sense, a legal exhibit before it is anything else.
George Stevens, the director credited here, had a career that stretched across decades of Hollywood features, but his wartime work with the US Army Signal Corps left a visible mark on the man and his output. He was present at the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, and the footage gathered under his supervision carries the weight of that direct witness. There is no studio, no score composed for the occasion, no reconstruction. The film is composed almost entirely of what the cameras found: the camps themselves, the evidence of what had happened inside them, the survivors, and the dead. Eisenhower appears in the film, as do Generals Omar N. Bradley and George S. Patton, their presence partly practical and partly a statement of authenticated record. The tagline carries its own solemn authority: "August 28, 1945. This is an Official Documentary Report." For those interested in how documentary film has grappled with historical atrocity, it sits in a lineage alongside very different but equally serious works, such as the documentary I reviewed a while back, and the 1972 documentary I covered separately. For other films from the same decade that grapple with darkness in different ways, I have also written about this 1940s film dealing with mob justice and moral failure and another piece of 1940s non-fiction filmmaking.
There is no meaningful cast to speak of in the conventional sense. Eisenhower, Bradley, Patton, and the others named are not actors performing roles. They are witnesses and commanders, present in the frame as a form of institutional testimony. The film does not require their performances. It requires, and receives, their presence. Approaching this as a piece of cinema, with all the usual frameworks of craft and entertainment, feels like applying the wrong tool entirely. It demands something else from the viewer, something closer to moral attention than aesthetic judgement.
Actual genuine footage of nazi war crimes and the victims thereof. It's impossible to rate. It's impossible to watch. I do not recommend.
I find myself with very little to add to that, and I mean that in the plainest possible way. There are films you cover on a blog like this because they are enjoyable, or interesting, or worth arguing about over a drink. This is not one of those films. It exists because something had to exist, because the world needed proof, and the cameras were there to provide it. The fact that I am writing about it at all feels faintly absurd given what it contains. If you have come here looking for a recommendation, or a reason to put it on of a Friday evening, then this is not your film. If you have come here because you felt you needed to understand what it is and why it matters, then I think you probably already know the answer to both questions.
Rating: Not rated | Year: 1945 | Watched: 2025-12-02
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
Stream: Cultpix
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
Watch in the US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 1940s: Louisiana Story (1948) · The Ox-Bow Incident (1943) · Men Without Wings (1946) · The Bank Dick (1940)
More documentary: Letter from Siberia (1957) · Lessons of Darkness (1992) · Style Wars (1983) · Here and Elsewhere (1976)
More history: Apocalypto (2006) · Rio 2096: A Story of Love and Fury (2013) · Harakiri (1962) · Night and Fog (1956)
