German Concentration Camps Factual Survey
[3] The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information,[4] with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a "treatment advisor".
Early in 1945, he began to make inquiries about the availability of Soviet films showing scenes of German atrocities.
Production of the film was ordered by the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) which was a unit of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF).
[7] Among the guidance Hitchcock provided was to recommend that the film avoid tricky editing to enhance its credibility, and to use wherever possible long shots and panning.
[4] No mention of the Holocaust was made in the production of the film, which might be attributed to the failure of the filmmakers to grasp the full scale of Adolf Hitler's Final Solution for Europe's Jews.
PBS notes that a 1941 British Ministry of Information guideline advised war propagandists to deal with "the treatment of indisputably innocent people, not with violent political opponents and not with Jews," to make their work credible.
The Imperial War Museum states that the project from the beginning was beset by "the practical difficulties of international co-operation and the realities of post-war shortages."
The U.S. withdrew from the project in July 1945, shortly before the Psychological Warfare Office and SHAEF were dissolved, leaving the British Ministry of Information in charge.
The British military desire for a more congenial approach to relations with Germans and completion of other concentration camp documentaries were also reasons for it not being released.
"[5] As a result of the film's shelving, it did not receive the same acclaim as other documentaries on the Holocaust such as Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1956), and Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969).
Work began in December 2008, using the filmmakers' rough cut, script and shot list, and the footage was digitalized by a post-production facility in Wales.
[14][15] In January 2015 it was disclosed that German Concentration Camps Factual Survey was to go into general release to the public sometime during the year, either on DVD or in theaters.
[17] The film production company 3 Generations, founded by Sidney Bernstein's daughter Jane Wells,[18] was granted screening rights to German Concentration Camps Factual Survey for North America and Puerto Rico.
[2] In a review of the restored film narrated by actor Jasper Britton, The New York Times called it "an extraordinary act of cinematic reclamation and historiography."
"[2] A 70-minute documentary on the making of the 1945 film, entitled Night Will Fall, was assembled from the partially finished material and new original footage by director Andre Singer and producers Sally Angel and Brett Ratner.
[11] The title of the film was derived from a line of narration in the 1945 documentary: "Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach, night will fall."
[6][12] Night Will Fall was broadcast on major television networks around the world, including HBO in the United States, the week of 27 January 2015, Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz concentration camp.
