Since SS camp personnel obeyed the strict prohibition against photography in Nazi annihilation, concentration, and work camps, the footage that Allied cameramen shot in such camps during and shortly after their liberation filled this void in visual documentation. Thus, what we imagine went on in Nazi camps while in operation has been shaped by pictures that document their very last stages, after the SS had fled most of these crime scenes, most inmates had been killed or died, and tens of thousands of the still living had been evacuated on death marches.
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So, though the arrival of Allied soldiers was a turning point for survivors, the film that Allied cameramen shot in those days tells us more about the effects of Nazi terror than about survivors’ liberation from it. This perception is not contrary to the cameramen’s intentions. They had been ordered to film evidence of Nazi crimes for use in future trials, to justify the high number of casualties to home audiences, and to confront the Germans with what they had obviously not let themselves worry too much about. The narrations of the Allied atrocity films compiled from this footage make it clear that it was shot during the liberation of camps; however, they quickly go on to teach the lessons that the filmmakers wanted their different audiences to learn from the shocking remnants of Nazi criminality. 1
The provenance of these images is far less clear today. Clips and stills from the liberation footage have been reproduced over and over again removed from their original context and included in big-screen and television documentaries, books, and exhibitions, not to mention searches on the Internet, where they have been mixed with images of different origins that have also come to represent the Holocaust: clips from the exceptional footage that the Nazis took in camps and ghettos, namely, Westerbork, Theresienstadt, and Warsaw, to use in deceptive propaganda; 2 filmed photographs from the now well-known SS album covering the selection process at Auschwitz-Birkenau; 3 and rare film and filmed not-so-rare photographs of pogroms and mass executions shot by German soldiers behind Germany's Eastern front.4 Images of these different origins are usually mixed together in order to give viewers a vivid, disturbing sense of how horrendous Nazi crimes were. But conveying their horrendousness does not yet explain anything about them. Moreover, not keeping images’ origins straight has led to misconceptions, e.g., of the conditions in different camps at different times and the belief that the Nazis shamelessly documented their crimes on film.
However, in this contribution I am not going to recontextualize frequently shown clips or discuss the extent to which the liberation footage, though shot after the fact, can nevertheless serve as a source for studying the history of the Holocaust. Instead, I shall examine some lesser-known shots that reveal the situation from which they originate, namely, liberators’ encounters with the liberated, encounters that overtaxed both sides. On the one hand, many liberators expressed disbelief at what they saw in front of them and mixed feelings of pity, disgust, guilt, and outrage.5 On the other hand, what liberation meant for the liberated and how they experienced it differed from camp to camp and from person to person, depending on a survivor's physical and mental state, how long he or she had been confined, and on what this person knew or did not know about the fates of family and friends, to name just a few crucial variables. Little of this could be observed by liberators or recorded by their cameras. This raises the questions whether Allied cameramen and filmmakers, aware of how limited their understanding was, still tried to tell filmically stories of liberation and, if so, what they were. Creating telling images of the perplexing encounters between liberators and liberated has been easier for feature filmmakers, who know some of the numerous memoirs and interviews of both survivors and veterans that have appeared since the end of the war. In order to assess the advantages that fiction has over the documentary footage of the time I shall discuss some feature films that include scenes of camp liberation.
Historical Liberators’ Looks at Survivors
The most straightforward attempt to tell a liberation story filmically was never edited or shown publicly. In the first days after the Red Army had reached Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, not much was filmed. The Soviets shot most of their Auschwitz liberation footage weeks later, when cameramen and film stock were again available, as was a spotlight for filming inside huts. 6 At this later time, when the snow visible in the earlier footage had melted, cameramen staged a jubilant liberation scene of the sort one would have naively expected or wished for. 80 seconds of film are shot from several angles, requiring repetitions of the performance. About 50 men, women, and children stand densely packed to