The death mills

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Movie
German title The death mills
Original title Death Mills
Country of production Germany
original language German
Publishing year 1945
length 22 minutes
Rod
Director Hanuš Burger
Billy Wilder (supervision)
script Hanuš burger
production Office of Military Government for Germany (US) (OMGUS)
cut Sam Winston
Death Mills (1945)

Death Mills , Death Mills , the first, immediately after the liberation by the US -produced documentary about the concentration camps . It was produced for demonstrations in occupied Germany and Austria under the direction of the exiled Czech Hanuš Burger and was intended to serve as a means of re- education to confront the German population with the crimes committed under their eyes.

Emergence

The documentary was produced by the newsreel department of the Information Control Division (ICD) of the American occupation forces in a German, a Yiddish and an English version. A similar project with Alfred Hitchcock ( Night Will Fall ) that had been discontinued provided some of the material. A large part of the film consists of sequences of the documentation Nazi concentration camp (AKA Nazi Concentration Camps ). The Psychological Warfare Division , an Anglo-American psychological warfare unit , used the film The Mills of Death as part of the re-education and denazification efforts . The documentary, which was completed in July 1945, premiered in October 1945 and was shown in cinemas in Bavaria from January 1946 and in Hesse, Hamburg and West Berlin from March 1946.

content

The film consists mainly of documentary material from various, recently liberated German concentration and extermination camps , including Dachau , Auschwitz , Majdanek , Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald . The film is underlaid with serious classical music, was provided with English and German-language sound and is 22 minutes long. It was initially planned as a narrative, historically explanatory feature film with a fictional plot. However, since this would have required too much preparation time and did not fit into the Allied concept, it was cut into a documentary.

The film shows what the Allies found when the concentration camps were liberated : the survivors, the living conditions in the camps and the evidence of the mass murder . The film also depicts the economic exploitation of the camp inmates. In addition, interrogations of the prisoners' guards, the forced inspection of the camp by the population from the area as well as visits by well-known personalities such as General Eisenhower , General Omar Nelson Bradley or the Archbishop of Canterbury are shown.

Between excerpts from Leni Riefenstahl's film Triumph des Willens with cheering Germans showing the Hitler salute, columns of German citizens are assembled to the concentration camps . Finally, the film ends with a scene in which men with shouldered crosses and shovels march to the barn near Gardelegen , in which there are about 1000 burned corpses from a death march that had been murdered there eight days earlier.

literature

  • Hanuš Burger: Spring was worth it. Memories. Bertelsmann, Munich 1977, pp. 232-266.
  • Brewster S. Chamberlin: Death Mills. An early attempt at mass 're-education' in occupied Germany, 1945–1946. In: Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte . Vol. 29, 1981, pp. 420-436 (PDF; 879 kB) .
  • David Bathrick: Billy Wilder's Cold War Berlin. In: New German Critique. Vol. 110, 2010, pp. 31–47, here pp. 31–34 (PDF; 922 kB) .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Entry under Deathmills. ( Memento from June 12, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) In: Cinematography of the Holocaust of the Fritz Bauer Institute , accessed on January 17, 2016.
  2. ↑ Ted Johnson: PopPolitics: Why Hitchcock Holocaust Project Was Shelved for Decades (Listen). In: Variety , January 24, 2015 (English).
  3. ↑ Jeffrey K. Olick: In the House of the Hangman. The Agonies of German Defeat, 1943-1949. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London 2005, pp. 98 f., Fn. 12 .