‘Night Will Fall’ takes a behind-the-scenes look at the making of another documentary, ‘German Concentration Camps: Factual Survey,’ which documented the British soldiers’ arrival at the German Death Camp of Bergen-Belsen.
The male and female SS Officers there were already in a state of surrender and, along with a similarly co-ed Hungarian military unit on-site, were made dig mass graves and to bury an estimated 30,000 emaciated corpses, strewn about the camp.
The British soldiers reported that the starving prisoners continued to die, as they arrived and that the scenes of industrialized death and mass crematoria were unspeakably dehumanizing, in a way that no field of battle could ever be.
The British Ministry of Information had hired some of the greatest living filmmakers to document the horrors of the newly-liberated Nazi concentration camps. Their mission was to capture images of what had happened, so that nobody could ever deny that such things had ever happened.
However, the film was shot and edited – then shelved for 70 years.
Branko Lustig, a co-producer of the award-winning ‘Schindler’s List,’ who appeared in ‘Night Will Fall,’ claimed that the British government had shelved and suppressed their own documentary, fearing that it would further aggravate the militant Zionists,
who’d been making trouble for the British, in what was then called Mandatory Palestine, formerly a part of the Ottoman Empire, which was part of the British spoils of World War I.
‘Night Will Fall’ director, Andre Singer expressed uncertainty about Lustig’s theory but said, “He may well have a point.”
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