

User Score
7 votes
June 14, 1940. The German Army marches into Paris. France is an occupied country. Through exclusive amateur footage, personal stories, and popular songs from the time, this fi lm recounts life with the enemy during the occupation, as seen by the French... and the Germans! Despite the Nazis and the troubled war times, day-to-day life in occupied France went on. People learnt to live with the rationing, the cues, the curfew... Many try to forget the hard times, mainly thanks to the movies in which big stars provide a little dream and lead a privileged life. These stars don't actually collaborate, butadapt and give the impression of normal life during the war. After all, is it necessarily shameful to shake the hand of an enemy?
Status
Released
Original Language
FR

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened. Making use of British, Soviet and American footage, the Ministry of Information’s Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada Television) aimed to create a documentary that would provide lasting, undeniable evidence of the Nazis’ unspeakable crimes. He commissioned a wealth of British talent, including editor Stewart McAllister, writer and future cabinet minister Richard Crossman – and, as treatment advisor, his friend Alfred Hitchcock. Yet, despite initial support from the British and US Governments, the film was shelved, and only now, 70 years on, has it been restored and completed by Imperial War Museums under its original title "German Concentration Camps Factual Survey".

Self (archive footage)

Produced and presented as evidence at the Nuremberg war crimes trial of Hermann Göring and twenty other Nazi leaders, this film consists primarily of dead and surviving prisoners and of facilities used to kill and torture during the World War II.