Die Todesmühlen

As the Allies liberated the concentration camps during WWII, they brought along film crews to record the Nazi atrocities. It's 1945. With the British film effort stalled, the Americans decide to use the material for their own film. Billy Wilder is brought in to direct the effort. It's only twenty minutes long. It's mostly stating the accusation with many of the horrific pictures. It is to be shown to the German population. At most, this is a short recitation of the horrible events. This stuff is probably too big to fit into twenty minutes. This cannot be anything more than the opening paragraph.

That is one of terrible lines of voice-over in this terrifying documentary compiled by Billy Wilder from motion pictures taken of the liberation of the German concentration camps in 1945.

I am an American Jew, born in 1954, and I live my life under the shadow of the Holocaust and the evidence of the evil of human beings. I have always known people with blue numbers tattooed on their arms. My grandfather's second wife was in Warsaw in September 1, 1939, and managed to escape via Arkhangel to the United States by the end of the month. Her son was not so lucky, and managed to survive the Death Camps. He lived the rest of his life in a constant state of terror. One day in the 1970s my cousin brought in a friend who was looking for work and after his friend had left, I asked what would wrong with him. "Both his parents came out of Dachau" answered my cousin.

The images in this movie are images I knew in my nightmare as a child: piles of corpses of skin and bones; walking corpses staring blankly; signs on the gates reading "Arbeit Mach Frei" -- 'Work will free you'; piles of teeth, bales of human hair, barrels of ashes from corpses ready to be sent to German farmers and, of course, the lying Germans who said they didn't know, they had no idea.

They knew. I know.

It feels gross to rate this as a '10' given how horrific it is, but that being said, this should be seen by everyone. I mean EVERYONE. The discomfort we feel when seeing these images is nothing compared to the lives lost and the lived experiences of those who survived the Holocaust. History repeats itself, and I fear that too many have forgotten about what the nazis did to their fellow human beings.

Make no mistake, the nazis were not "monsters". Calling them monsters distances them from being human, and they were very human.

Just like you and me, and that should scare the hell out of everyone that our fellow man is capable commit such atrocities. Make no mistake, they are capable.

Don't turn a blind eye. To deny that this happened is to deny that human beings are capable of evil.

Alain Resnais famed 1955 French documentary "Night And Fog" took the world by storm... many knew about the death camps in Poland, but few had ever seen the horror of the aftermath of the Holocaust... the dead bodies that were gassed or shot dead but not yet cremated or buried and the collection of shoes, human hair and clothing of the tens of thousands who were cremated was too horrific still for most to imagine in 1955...

Well this film was made by the legendary Billy Wilder 10 years prior, but seldom seen... and this film was more refined, more brutal and featured much more horrific footage then "Night And Fog"

This short 22 minute documentary is actually a truncated version of a documentary titled "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey" but the full 75 minute film would not be completed for another 70 years, losing much of it's potency in the time since.

I can imagine the reaction in 1945 when the war had just ended, judging by the reaction of 'Night And Fog', it would probably pass for a terrifying horror film

I suppose the scariest thing one can take away from the holocaust is that it's perpetrators felt justified in what they had done, they saw themselves as the good guys, they saw themselves as heroes.

Perception is a really powerful thing, the fact that we can look at the same object and see different things is scary. Some might say that what the nazis did was unprecedented but is it really? Sure maybe in its efficiency but genocide wasn't a nazi innovation. Genocide is a human innovation it had occurred long before ww2. Think of the Circassian Genocide, Armenian Genocide and the much more recent Rwandan genocide and those are just the tiny few we're know of and are allowed to call genocides. Some of the most powerful nations today have committed genocides and other horrendous acts against other humans but we can't call their atrocities genocides because they in control, they won and still hold power.

Some of the perpetrators of these genocides are seen as heroes and have statues and monuments dedicated to them. Some people often ask "how could the Nazis think they could get it?" They thought they could get away with it because they learnt from history that others have gotten away with it. Ask yourself had the nazis won do you think we'd have had any idea of what went on? Or would it have been covered up like so many have been through out history?

Perhaps humanity is just an aspiration.