An Obscured Message

An Obscured Message

Memory of the Camps is an hour-long documentary detailing the liberation of Nazi concentration camps. It was assembled from footage taken by cameramen traveling with Allied troops in 1945 by the British Millitary with the purpose of humiliating the Germans and documenting their war crimes for the world. The project remained unfinished until it was completed many years later by talented filmmakers, including well-known director Alfred Hitchcock, and it was presented on May 7, 1985 on the U.S. television show Frontline. The film was aired with the purpose of, as the film itself states, "[creating] document to serve our collective memory" (Memory of the Camps). By this statement, the narrator Trevor Howard means that by viewing the atrocities committed by the Germans we can understand how horrifying the holocaust was, and through that understanding we can prevent it from happening again. Even the title of the film, "Memory of the Camps", shows that the purpose of the film is remembrance. This purpose is similar the message Susan Sontag delivers in her book Regarding the Pain of Others, in which she emphasizes that we must face an unpleasant confrontation in order to truly understand what we're seeing and to have compassion for those we're regarding. Indeed, Memory of the Camps bombards its viewers with horrifying images of the holocaust; footage of pits containing thousands upon thousands of corpses. The dismal conditions in the camps are shown through film and the narrator's sarcastic dialogue. The imagery in this documentary was so horrific, so powerful, that I could almost smell the pungent decay of the rotting corpses.

The film Memory of the Camps fails to give its viewers an objective presentation of the holocaust and severely demonizes all Germans, stating they're each individually responsible, and by doing so ironically undermines its very purpose. The filmmakers failed to realize that the underlying cause of the holocaust was the Nazi's demonization of the Jewish race, among others. During World War 2 Nazi propaganda was developed specifically to brew hatred and contempt for Jews within the German population. Likewise, footage from Memory of the Camps was originally intended as propaganda to "[Ð'...] document unflinchingly the conditions of the camps in order to shake and humiliate the Germans and prove to them beyond any possible challenge that crimes against humanity were committed and that the German people -- and not just the Nazis and SS -- bore responsibility" (PBS). The film effectively emphasizes this by contrasting German and British people throughout film, by showing footage of prison conditions before and after the camps were liberated, and through the narrator's dialogue. The film's narration makes one such comparison between German and British treatment of prisoners, stating: "[Germans had not provided] water supply for three days, the Germans pleaded that it had been cut off," and "[the British] laid on water in a few hours and before twelve hours had passed, had sufficient water to enable them to wash" (Memory of the Camps). A second example can be seen in the medical treatment of the prisoners, where Nazis treated them like "dogs" the British used the Nazi's own abundant medical supplies Ð'- suggesting the Germans could have done the same with similar ease Ð'- to treat the prisoners: "Two miles away from the camp was a large S.S. Panzer training school and hospital well stocked with medical supplies Ð'- strange that these should not have been used by the Germans for the inmates" (Memory of the Camps). These comparisons Ð'- two of many Ð'- portray the Germans as sadistic monsters while the British were benevolent liberators.

I disagree with the narrator's position and message that all Germans were to blame for the holocaust. Even before the film shows the concentration camps it displays footage of thousands of German people rallying around Hitler, a leader as notoriously maleficent as he was charismatic. The film remains silent while Hitler speaks in his unique style, there is no audio, and the silence makes Hitler Ð'- with his arms flailing in the air Ð'- appear insane. The narrator states "In March 1933, 17,264,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party [Ð'...]" (Memory of the Camps). The filmmakers intended for this fact to illustrate that the German people were all responsible for the Nazi's actions, because they voted for them. I found it personally offensive that the filmmakers could use footage originally intended as propaganda to humiliate the Germans to advance such a noble cause as remembrance of the holocaust. The filmmakers failed to realize that all people Ð'- even British ones Ð'- are capable of doing what the Nazis did if they were in the same set of circumstances. Stanley Milgram's famous experiment in social psychology, conducted in 1963, proved