The title is taken from the Nacht und Nebel (German for "Night and Fog") program of abductions and disappearances decreed by Nazi Germany.

The documentary features the abandoned grounds of Auschwitz and Majdanek established in occupied Poland while describing the lives of prisoners in the camps.

The first part of Night and Fog shows remnants of Auschwitz while the narrator Michel Bouquet describes the rise of Nazi ideology.

[3] The exhibit was based on Michel and Wormser's monograph, which had been published earlier in 1954 in a special issue of Revue d'histoire de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale.

[6][7] Although Michel was under pressure from veterans' organizations to create a film that would honor French Resistance fighters, Wormser argued for a scholarly approach that would show the concentration camps as a systematic microcosm of the German war economy.

Michel recognized that this approach would enable broader financing, and both re-envisioned the film as "communicating historical research through contemporary media.

Michel and Wormser might have wanted scholarly objectivity instead of the heroism favoured by the deportees' association...but nevertheless the Holocaust had remained a blind spot even for them.

[9] For more than a week, Resnais resisted the offer, believing that only someone with first-hand experience of concentration camps should attempt the subject matter.

[10] Resnais eventually agreed, providing that poet and novelist Jean Cayrol, who had been a concentration camp prisoner, would collaborate on the project.

[11] Cayrol had written in 1946 about his experience as a survivor of Mauthausen in Poèmes de la nuit et brouillard ("Poems of night and fog"), from which the documentary was titled.

Resnais intended the film to warn of the horrors of Nazism, which he feared could be repeated during the Algerian War, during which torture and internment were already taking place.

A pre-production meeting was held on 28 May 1955, during which participants decided "to explain clearly how the concentration-camp system (its economic aspect) flowed automatically from fascism".

The film's working title, Resistance and Deportation, was changed to the French translation of the German term Nacht und Nebel (Night and Fog).

This decree provided that those resisting the Reich, who were arrested in their own countries but not promptly executed, would be deported to camps where they would vanish without a trace, "into the night and fog".

Another layer of meaning is expressed one quarter of the way through the film: Hanns Eisler's chilling score, which has accompanied images of deportation, is disrupted as the train arrives at Auschwitz.

[13][page needed] Michel's and Wormser's 1954 exhibit Resistance, Liberation, Deportation was organized in nine parts:[14] This was adapted into seven parts for the first draft of the film (dating from late February/early March 1955):[14] The outline of the film changed dramatically when in April 1955, Wormser and Michel went to Poland to attend commemorations for the tenth anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation.

[17] Resnais filmed his color sequences in Eastmancolor rather than Agfacolor, using the footage to contrast the desolate tranquility of several concentration camps — Auschwitz, Birkenau, Majdanek, Struthof, and Mauthausen — with the horrific events that occurred there during World War II, to muse on the diffusion of guilt, and to pose the question of responsibility.

While Night and Fog states that the Nazis made soap from the corpses, giving the possible impression that this was done regularly, this claim is now considered untrue, with the exception of isolated cases.

[19] Other stock footage is from the Rijksinstituut voor Oorlogsdokumentatie (National institute for war documentation) in the Netherlands, and from French television, Gaumont Film Company, and the association of former deportees.

[19] Cayrol was aided by mutual friend and film maker Chris Marker while writing the commentary that was spoken by actor Michel Bouquet.

I'm living here like a monk, I go to bed at 8 in the evening, eat and drink very little and don't feel at all at ease in this giant city with all the responsibility for the film.

Another point of contention was that Resnais had included photographs of French officers guarding a detention center where Jews were gathered before deportation; it was operated by the collaborationist Vichy government located in central France.

[32] The French press reacted negatively to the proposed withdrawal, noting that Cayrol and Resnais had been careful to define the difference between Nazi criminals and the German people.

[34] On 10 May 1990 a Jewish cemetery at Carpentras was desecrated, and the body of a freshly buried man, Felix Germont, impaled on a stake.

Night and Fog was broadcast on all three of the French national television channels at the same time to remind viewers of what took place under the Nazis.

Todd Gitlin describes it as "an unbearable apotheosis of desolation that speaks to the necessity of our making a mental effort to grasp what is impossible to grasp—a duty that has been imposed upon us by history.

[citation needed] The film relates that the Nazis used human corpses to make soap, a claim now seen by modern scholarship as a myth arising from wartime rumours.

[48][49] Alan Pakula studied Night and Fog when he was writing the 1982 film adaptation of Sophie’s Choice, William Styron's 1979 novel about a Polish-Catholic survivor of Auschwitz.

[51] Michael Haneke criticized films such as Downfall (2004) and Schindler's List (1993) for manipulating the audience to perceive events subjectively and not giving any room for an objective point of view.