People no longer behaving as human beings

THE NIGHT WILL FALL (2014)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia
Originally published in Steel Notes Magazine

No one can dispute that one of the most horrific crimes of the 20th century can’t easily be forgotten, especially by those who survived to witness it and tell the tale. The Nazi Holocaust is that crime, one which still perplexes me to this day. “The Night Will Fall” is an absorbing and nightmarishly haunting documentary that rivets the attention and shakes your own well-being to the core. It is a devastating film that will leave you speechless.

In elementary schools, at least during the 1980’s when I attended, images of those horrific death camps were shown. Most of the world has seen the mangled, emaciated corpses of Jewish men, women and children bulldozed into mass graves. “Night Will Fall” takes a different position – it chronicles the making of these largely unseen, incomplete documentaries, a first-person narrative of the cameramen who were there to film this devastating record. We first see the liberation of the first death camp to be liberated by British Forces (British 11th Armored Division), Bergen-Belsen, where the soldiers armed with cameras begin to record tantalizing footage. This footage is useful as not only a public record but also as evidence against the SS officers who participated in this mass extermination. Bodies are seen carried about as if they were inanimate human rag dolls, most of them naked and disposed of in pits and carried into trucks. The British soldiers have no idea of what to make of this, a reality of which can never be shaken off or forgotten. BBC war correspondent, Richard Dimbleby, reports on the 30,000 bodies in plain view at Belsen (typhus had killed many, possibly even Anne Frank who did die at Belsen). The towns and villages nearby Belsen have no clue what has transpired though the smell of death, as sensed by the British soldiers, lingers and dominates the countryside. This was not the time for the German folk to be blissfully ignorant.

“Night Will Fall” also documents the Soviet troops who liberated and documented the atrocities at the Auschwitz and Majdanek camps in Poland, a year before Belsen. But what is most astounding is the discovery that the Soviets’ footage was not considered a reliable source by the British, for reasons never made clear. Maybe the British, as with the rest of the world, didn’t want to believe the bitter truth about those death camps. Once the combat cameramen made their way to Belsen, the truth was unmistakable. Also remarkable is that the Belsen footage was to be edited into a film titled “German Concentration Camps Factual Survey” (narrated by the late actor Trevor Howard). This film would have served as a factual presentation of that bitter truth. Unfortunately, despite the editorial presence of Alfred Hitchcock on hand, the film was never completed and only some clips were shown. The reasons behind it perplexed me: the British wanted to establish an alliance with Germany post-World War II in hopes of combatting a new enemy, Communism. I suppose the last thing the British wanted to do was to be accused of presenting war crimes as propaganda.

What clips we do see in “The Night Will Fall” are so stunning, so powerful, so staggeringly emotional that it is hard to watch it without shedding a tear (some living British officers who are interviewed in the documentary have trouble holding back their emotions). In fact, all Holocaust deniers should watch this because the filmed record does not lie. We see the Jewish hostages reacting with joy when liberated, some with scalding emotional tears of relief, a relief they never expected. We see empty towers where Nazis had once set their rifles overlooking the camps. We see German residents in droves coming into Belsen, overcome with absolute shock by what was hidden from them. We also see something which I never knew; SS officers helping to dispose of bodies that lay on the ground. We also see how other Jewish hostages are gathered near the stench of death beneath their feet.

“The Night Will Fall” is not as chillingly poetic as Alan Resnais’ “Night and Fog” from 1955 (that film showed the lifelessness of the camps a decade later) but it is a haunting, hair-raising, deeply resonant documentary about what Dimbleby once most accurately said of the SS and of other nations that might practice such atrocities, “People no longer behaving as human beings.”