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International Federation of Film Archives (1984) - Historical Column: The Great Lost Hitchcock Drama

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THE GREAT LOST HITCHCOCK DRAMA

For more than a month now, the Film Department of the Imperial War Museum has been flooded with requests for viewings and in some cases for purchase of prints of "the lost Alfred Hitchcock film" on the Nazi concentration camps which the museum has been hiding in its vaults since 1945. The story began with an article in "The Times" newspaper on 12 December 1983, by Caroline Moorhead, the biographer of Sidney Bernstein and it was later taken up by Independent Television News who put it out worldwide by satellite, using some of the concentration camp footage supplied by the Museum. As ever, journalists had a wonderful time with stories of lost or (better still) suppressed film, dark and secret vaults, and so forth, all this added to the usual obsession about anything of any kind to do with Hitler's Third Reich (If not a secret diary, why not a secret film?).

Unfortunately the facts of the matter are less glamorous. After the liberation of the concentration camps in 1945, Sidney Bernstein, at that time working for the Ministry of Information in London, initiated a project to make a film which would reveal to the world and to the Germans in particular, the full horrors of what had happened. A script had been written and the ministry secured film footage from British, American and Soviet sources. There had been a number of options for the choice of a director for the film, the final one being Hitchcock, still in America at that time. The material was assembled by Stewart McAllister, better known as an editor during the war for his cooperation with Humphrey Jennings on films like LISTEN TO BRITAIN.

After July 1945, the project was dropped, for reasons that are not absolutely clear, although the Americans went on to make a film called DIE TODESMÜHLEN and concentration camp film also appeared in the newsreal series, WELT IN FILM, issued by the occupying authorities in the western zones of Germany. At some time in that month, Hitchcock viewed the reels assembled by McAllister but it is not known whether they worked together. The footage was later handed over to the Imperial War Museum as part of its very large collection of concentration camp film, together with the script. There are one or two sections which contain sound interviews but the rest is mute.

The end of the story then is that the film was not made. There never has been a lost Hitchcock documentary. The footage which was being assembled has been available for many years and has been used by film and television companies for other compilations.

Clive Coultass
January 1984

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