He was making propaganda films...to tell the world that we had been fighting this just war but without showing anything too graphic. You don’t want to frighten the horses. Then suddenly he is in Belsen
As Jameson puts it, “He was making propaganda films...to tell the world that we had been fighting this just war but without showing anything too graphic. You don’t want to frighten the horses. Then suddenly he is in Belsen.”
Sidney Bernstein[Missing Credit]
Hitchcock with his wife and life-long collaborator Alma Reville, Jane Wells and her brother David[Missing Credit]
Here among the thousands of emaciated dead, diseased and dying Bernstein knew that those rules must no longer apply.
“He says, ‘for the first time in history we don’t point our cameras away. We point our cameras at the horror,’” says Jameson whose play is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 tomorrow to mark the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen Belsen.
This is one of the most fascinating collaborations in filmmaking history, one which in Jameson’s play begins the moment Hitchcock arrives at Southampton docks on an American troop carrier in 1945 where he is met by his old London Film Society friend Bernstein
Henry Goodman plays Bernstein and Jeremy Swift plays Bernstein’s surprise collaborator on the project Alfred Hitchcock. This is one of the most fascinating collaborations in filmmaking history, one which in Jameson’s play begins the moment Hitchcock, who had just made the film Spellbound in Hollywood with Ingrid Bergman and Gregory Peck, arrives at Southampton docks on an American troop carrier in 1945 where he is met by his old London Film Society friend Bernstein.
Hitchcock discovered a haunted and desperate version of the man he knew before the war. Bernstein had been given the job to make a film that would force the German public to drop claims they knew nothing of the camps. He returned to Britain hours of black and white mostly soundless footage. Haunted and traumatised by what he had seen first hand, he was unable to turn the footage of chaotic horror that his crew had captured on primitive movie cameras into a visual narrative. Desperate for help he turned to Hitchcock who answered the call.
The result was the historic German Concentration Camps Factual Survey. The title chosen by Bernstein deliberately separated the work form the propaganda material he had been producing for the British up to that point.
Jane Wells[Missing Credit]
“He had an uncanny sense of what people would and would not believe,” says Wells who is herself an acclaimed documentary maker and helped Jameson with his research.
“It’s so haunting to me that he anticipated Holocaust denial before the term was even invented, before we talked about “the Shoah,” says Wells.
Having been kitted out by the British government with silent cameras Bernstein realised he needed sound.
“He got the microphones there to do simultaneous interviews. His film contains the first recorded testimony of the Holocaust,” says Wells. “This is something I didn’t even know until I interviewed Stephen Smith who was then director of the Shoah Foundation in LA.”
Wells, it turns out, is making a film about her father’s collaboration with Hitchcock. Her documentaries often focus on human rights. She produced the award-winning The Devil Came on Horseback about the Darfur genocide and founded the film company 3 Generations which focuses on human rights including the Holocaust.
“My father was very fierce in his beliefs about right and wrong; good and bad and morality. I think he did give that to us,” says Wells who was born when her father was 59 and is the youngest of her father’s two children.
My father was very fierce in his beliefs about right and wrong; good and bad and morality.
To Bernstein’s disgust his British masters shelved his Belsen film. Their concern was that the film would cause resentment among the German population at a time when the British wanted the Germans to be allies in the coming Cold War. Still, a newly restored version of Bernstein’s now exists at the Imperial War Museum and can even be bought on Amazon. But also painfully for Bernstein the British were also concerned that mention of the victims being mostly Jewish would stoke the conspiracy theory that Britain was fighting the war on the behalf of the Jews.
“Next to public bomb shelters during the blitz there were posters saying ‘Your Resolve Will Bring Us Victory,’ says Jameson. “The word ‘Us’ would often get crossed out and the word ‘Jews’ would be written over it, probably by Oswald Moseley’s lot.”
According to Jameson’s Hitchcock was as appalled by the government policy as Bernstein. He was also as deeply affected. One fascinating possibility posited by Jameson is that working on the Belsen footage changed the way Hitchcock approached his films.
Martin Jameson at The Writers' Guild of Great Britain Awards in 2022 (Photo: Getty)Getty Images
“I watched all the Hitchcock films over that period, which was fascinating because he moves from just telling spy stories in the 1930s [and then] after the war what he starts to do is examine the nature of evil. A film like Rope, based on a Patrick Hamilton play, is actually a post-Nazi film. And you can say this is being trivial, but when I looked at some of the [Belsen] footage that Hitchcock looked at – well, there are shower heads.” Think the Psycho shower scene.
This hitherto little known influence on Hitchcock’s work is being explored by Wells for her film.
“It is the story of the anti-fascist work my father and Hitch did in the 1930s, through to their collaboration on Factual Survey of German Concentration Camps. And then my film goes on to see what they did afterwards, together and separately, and how that experience of trying to edit the footage from from the camps influenced the work they did subsequently. So it sort of goes pretty much through the 20th century.”
Wells’ father never spoke about his Belsen experience to her.
“I had absolutely no idea that he had been there until 1984 when I guess it was all declassified in some way and Granada made (the TV programme ) A Painful Reminder. I was actually working for Granada, and my one of my first jobs was to sell that programme for distribution. I didn’t understand the impact Belsen had on him or the Hitchcock connection until much later. I didn’t understand how involved he was.”
I didn’t understand the impact Belsen had on him or the Hitchcock connection until much later. I didn’t understand how involved he was
For Bernstein the affect of the Holocaust on his work could be seen in the way Granada Television set the standard for documentary making.
“Look at what Granada became and how World in Action took no prisoners in the way they approached truth and fact telling,” says Wells.
In 2019 she found out that that her father, who died in 1993, had immediate family who were killed in the Holocaust - his mother’s sister and cousins. As far as Wells knows they died in Poland in a concentration camp. Whether Bernstein knew this when he went to Belsen is not yet known.
“He certainly would have thought about it,” says Wells.
Bernstein was a socialist, “very left wing” and according to Wells “had to pass as a non-Jew to have the job he had at the Ministry of Information. I think he internalised so much because that was how he had to survive to do what he wanted to do.”
At home there was no Jewish observance. Wells’ mother was not Jewish and her older brother David did not have a barmitzvah. Passover and Yom Kippur was observed during visits to Bernstein relatives.
Hitchcock (middle) and (left) Bernstein[Missing Credit]
“Yet he was very proud of his Jewish heritage,” says Wells. “I can distinctly remember when the Yom Kippur War happened we got involved as teenagers raising money, and he said it was very important to him that we supported Israel.”
He was very proud of his Jewish heritage. He said it was very important to him that we supported Israel
Wells views her father’s Belsen film with a filmmaker’s eye. “I was dreading it of course, but my first impression was how brilliant it is. You can see Hitchcock’s influence,” she says.
As remarkable is that among the death and horror, Bernstein had his camera operators film the beginnings of humanity being restored to survivors with scenes showing rows skeletal bodies being deloused and washed by British nurses, which is also a feature of Mendes’s film.
“To incorporate this sort of restorative and re-humanising footage is incredible,” says Wells. “That as a marvellous surprise about what my father did.”
The Film is broadcast on BBC Radio 4 at 15:00 on Saturday, April 12 and is on BBC Sounds
