The winner of America’s Critics’ Choice Awards in the documentary short category only just missed out being in the running for Sunday’s Oscars ceremony. Yet Camp Confidential, which reveals a long-held secret about how America smuggled high-ranking Nazis into the country during the Second World War, will linger in the minds of those who watch the Netflix film.
And not just because of the morally dubious decision of giving Nazis jobs instead of prosecuting them. But because the American soldiers whose job it was to interrogate and guard the Nazis were Jewish.
“We asked, is it real? I mean, did it really happen?” says the film’s Israeli filmmaker Mor Loushy, who with her husband, Daniel Sivan, co-directed Camp Confidential.
When their producers, brothers Benji and Jono Bergmann, first came across the story of how Jewish, German-speaking American soldiers were ordered to not only guard such high-profile Nazis as Wernher Von Braun, but make them feel at home, the initial idea was to dramatise it.
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Netflix film Camp Confidential juxtaposes original footage, above, with animated characters (Netflix)
“We were living in LA back then,” says Loushy, speaking on Zoom from her home in Tel Aviv. She and Sivan have been making films together for 17 years.
“They told us this story and Daniel and I jumped up and said ‘let us make a documentary first’, and they said ‘Sure’.
“I was pretty sceptical in the first few weeks,” adds the director. “I told Daniel I want proof this happened. I want proof that it’s real. Because I heard about Operation Paperclip (the American plot to conscript Nazi scientists into America’s rocket programme when the war was over). But during the war? That was astonishing.” Yet even more astonishing than the existence of the camp — which had the code name PO Box 1142 — were the orders given to the Jewish guards.
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Netflix film Camp Confidential juxtaposes original footage, above, with animated characters (Netflix)
It was thought catering to the prisoners’ wants and needs would be a more productive way of extracting information than subjecting them to hardcore interrogation.
In fact, the film highlights how they were given a future and allowed to be joined by their families.
The strategy worked. The Nazis’ captors discovered that the V1 and V2 rockets were being developed at Peenemunde on Germany’s Baltic Coast, which was later bombed by the Allies.
But the Jewish guards were often refugees from Austria or Germany and they became increasingly conflicted as it was made clear that their job was to pamper not punish their captives.
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Arno Mayer, one of the last guards at PO Box 1142 who is still alive
On orders from the Pentagon guard Arno Mayer, who is interviewed in the film, they were given $1,000 to take their captives to Lansburgh & Brother department store, which was the largest of its kind in Washington DC.
“And I knew it was Jewish,” says Mayer. “So it gave me some sort of nasty pleasure to take these guys to a Jewish department store.”
They were there because the Nazis wanted to send their wives and girlfriends back in Germany presents to help them cope with the winter. Chocolate, coffee, tea etc, or so Mayer presumed. “Unterwäsche!” said the Germans pointing to the lingerie department, much to the horror of Mayer, who had never bought woman’s underwear.
That scene and many others in the camp is recreated in Loushy and Silva’s film using animation — a bold choice for a documentary about a period that is usually conveyed by archive.
However, there is much more aural material about the camp than there is visual. America’s National Parks Service, on discovering the camp’s existence, explored its history by lobbying the US government to declassify the secret. They the also tracked down the surviving Jewish guards. The documentary draws on these tapes, but today only two guards survive: Mayer and Peter Weiss.
“It was Daniel who suggested animation,” says Loushy. “It had to connect to the story, to the Holocaust and to this era.
“We wanted the animation to help the viewer to be inside the story because in our filmmaking we don’t like historians, we don’t like professors. We wanted the viewer to really feel that they were in PO Box 1142.”
The technique made the appearance of actual archive all the more effective, says the director. “When we cut to the real archive we wanted the viewer to understand what happened in the Holocaust. What the crimes are, and what are we talking about when when we say that Wernher von Braun was a criminal.”
It is a message powerfully put by the film, which juxtaposes images of the Holocaust with Von Braun, a loyal Nazi who used concentration camp slave labour, with footage of him being celebrated by America in its bid to beat the Soviet Union in the space race.
One of the most telling pieces of archive is of the Apollo 11 mission watched by various VIPs with binoculars, one of whom is Von Braun.
“When I found this archive I told Daniel quick, come home, you need to see it, I had the chills,” says Loushy.
“It goes back to the question of whether you can do bad things to achieve good ends,” asks Weiss, who went to become a renowned human rights lawyer. “And I would say that if you do that, then the end that you achieve is not worthwhile.”
