Memory of the Camps. Alfred Hitchock

The unseen 1945 Alfred Hitchcock Film with images from the concentration camps forbidden by the allies now to be released

The film with shocking images about the holocaust waited 70 years to be released. "Memory from the Camps" is known as the documentary never seen by Hitchcock.

From The Guardian:

"An Alfred Hitchcock documentary about the Holocaust, which was suppressed for political reasons, is to be screened for the first time in the form its director intended after being restored by the Imperial War Museum, reports the Independent.

Hitchcock was asked to assemble footage shot by a British army film unit cameraman of the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945. But the resulting documentary, which had been commissioned in an attempt to inform and educate the German populace about the atrocities carried out by the Nazis in their name, was ultimately held back.

It was not shown at all until 1984, in an incomplete version at the Berlin film festival, and was missing a sixth reel and in poor quality when it was screened on the PBS network in the US a year later. Now the film, retrospectively titled Memory of the Camps, is to finally see the light of day in a format Hitchcock would have approved of.

"It was suppressed because of the changing political situation, particularly for the British," Dr Toby Haggith, senior curator at the Imperial War Museum, told the Independent. "Once they discovered the camps, the Americans and British were keen to release a film very quickly that would show the camps and get the German people to accept their responsibility for the atrocities that were there."

Haggith said the film, shown at test screenings, extremely disturbed colleagues, experts and film historians. The film's narration, which has been re-recorded with a new actor, features descriptions of "sightseers" at a "chamber of horrors".

"The digital restoration has made this material seem very fresh," said Haggith. "One of the common remarks was that it [the film] was both terrible and brilliant at the same time."

The film is due to be broadcast on British television in 2015 to mark the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Europe. It will be accompanied by a new documentary from André Singer, a producer on the acclaimed 2013 film The Act of Killing, which has topped a number of critical best of the year lists, including the Guardian's. Both films will be shown at film festivals and cinemas later this year."

(http://www.theguardian.com/film/2014/jan/10/unseen-alfred-hitchcock-holocaust-documentary-screening)

The Brazilian ranch where Nazis kept slaves (By Gibby Zobel BBC World Service, Campino do Monte Alegre, Brazil)

 

Our friend and research mate Professor MS Heitor Loureiro, sent us an extraordinary narrative about a unknown chapter of the conexion history between Brazil and the national-socialism, during the 30s.

"On a farm deep in the countryside 100 miles (160km) west from Sao Paulo, a football team has lined up for a commemorative photograph. What makes the image extraordinary is the symbol on the team's flag - a swastika.

The picture probably dates from some time in the 1930s, after the Nazi Party's rise to power in Germany - but this was on the other side of the world.

"Nothing explained the presence of a swastika here," says Jose Ricardo Rosa Maciel, former rancher at the remote Cruzeiro do Sul farm near Campina do Monte Alegre, who stumbled across the photograph one day.

But this was actually his second puzzling discovery. The first occurred in the pigsty.

"One day the pigs broke a wall and escaped into the field," he says. "I noticed the bricks that had fallen. I thought I was hallucinating."

The underside of each brick was stamped with the swastika.

It's well known that pre-war Brazil had strong links with Nazi Germany - the two were economic partners and Brazil had the biggest fascist party outside Europe, with more than 40,000 members.

But it was years before Maciel - thanks to detective work by history professor Sidney Aguilar Filho - learned the grim story of his farm's links to Brazil's fascists.

Filho established that the farm had once been owned by the Rocha Mirandas, a family of wealthy industrialists from Rio de Janeiro.

Three of them - father Renato and two of his sons, Otavio and Osvaldo - were members of the Acao Integralista Brasileira, an extreme right-wing organisation, sympathetic to the Nazis.

The family sometimes held rallies on the farm, hosting thousands of the organisation's members. But it was also a brutal work-camp for abandoned - and non-white - children.

"I found a story of 50 boys aged around 10 years old who had been taken from an orphanage in Rio," says Filho. "They were taken in three waves. The first was a group of 10 in 1933."

Osvaldo Rocha Miranda applied to be a guardian of the orphans, according to documents discovered by Filho, and a legal decree was granted.

"He sent his driver, who put us in a corner," says 90-year-old Aloysio da Silva, one of the first orphans conscripted to work on the farm.

"Osvaldo was pointing with a cane - 'Put that one over there, this one here' - and from 20 boys, he took 10.

"He promised the world - that we would play football, go horse-riding. But there wasn't any of this. The 10 of us were given hoes to clear the weeds and clean up the farm. I was tricked."

The children were subject to regular beatings with a palmatoria, a wooden paddle with holes designed to reduce air resistance and increase pain. They were addressed not by their name, but by a number - Silva's was number 23. Guard dogs ensured they stayed in line.

"One was called Poison, the male, and the female was called Trust," says Silva, who still lives in the area. "I try to avoid talking about it."

Argemiro dos Santos is another survivor. As a boy, he had been found on the streets and taken to an orphanage. Then Rocha Miranda came for him.

"They didn't like black people at all," says Santos, now 89.

"There was punishment, from not giving us food to the palmatoria. It hurt a lot. Two hits sometimes. The most would be five because a person couldn't stand it.

"There were photographs of Hitler and you were compelled to salute. I didn't understand any of it."

Some of the surviving Rocha Miranda family say their forebears stopped supporting Nazism well before World War Two.

Maurice Rocha Miranda, great-nephew of Otavio and Osvaldo, also denies that the children on the farm were kept as "slaves".

He told the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper that the orphans on the farm "had to be controlled, but were never punished or enslaved".

But Filho believes the survivors' stories. And despite it being a long time ago, both Silva and Santos - who have never met since – tell very similar, harrowing tales.

The orphans' only respite came in football matches against teams of local farm workers such as the one pictured in the photograph with the swastika flag. Football was key to the ideology of the integralistas. Military parades took place at the Vasco da Gama football ground and the game was regularly used for propaganda purposes under Brazil's dictator, Getulio Vargas.

"We'd have a kick around and it evolved," he says. "We had a championship - we were good at football. There was no problem."

But after several years, Santos had had enough.

"There was a gate and I left it ajar," he says. "Later that night, I was out of there. No-one saw."

Santos returned to Rio where, aged 14, he slept rough and worked as a newspaper seller. Then in 1942, after Brazil declared war on Germany, he joined the navy as a taifeiro, waiting on tables and washing up.

He had gone from working for Nazis, to fighting them.

"I was just fulfilling what Brazil needed to do," says Santos. "I couldn't have hate for Hitler - I didn't know the guy! I didn't know who he was."

Santos went on patrol in Europe and then spent much of World War Two working on ships hunting submarines off the Brazilian coast.

Today Santos is known locally by his nickname Marujo - "sailor" - and proudly shows off a certificate and medal that recognises his war service. But he is also famous for another reason - as one of Brazil's top footballers of the 1940s, becoming a midfielder for some of the biggest teams in Brazil.

"At that time professional players didn't exist, it was all amateur," says Santos. "I played for Fluminense, Botafogo, Vasco da Gama. The players were all newspaper sellers and shoeshine boys."

Nowadays Santos lives a quiet life in south-western Brazil with Guilhermina, his wife of 61 years.

"I like to play my trumpet, I like to sit on the veranda, I like to have a cold beer. I have a lot of friends and they pass by and chat," he says.

Memories of the farm, though, are impossible to escape.

"Anyone who says they have had a good life since they were born is lying," he says. "Everyone has something bad that has happened in their life." 

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25815796 3/3” 

(Wellspring of information: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25815796)

The Wannse Conference and the decision to exterminate the european jews.

"On 20 January 1942 Reinhard Heydrich, the Head of the Reich Security Main Office, chaired a meeting of 15 high-ranking civil servants and SS officers in a villa at Großer Wannsee 56/58. The topic of the conference was technical, logistic and legal implementation of the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question", which was an euphemism for a planned mass extermination of Jews. (Protocol of Conference:http://www.ghwk.de/fileadmin/user_upload/pdf-wannsee/texte/protocol.pdf)

Exactly a year after this conference, on 20 January 1943, a transport of 748 Jews arrived to Auschwitz from the Westerbork camp in occupied Netherlands – 315 men and boys and 433 women and girls. After the selection 10 men and 25 women were registered in the camp. The remaining 713 people were killed in the gas chambers. On the same day a transport of around 2,000 Jews from the ghetto in Grodno arrived to the camp. After the selection 155 men and 101 women were registered. The remaining group, probably 1,744 people, were killed in the gas chambers." (https://www.facebook.com/auschwitzmemorial?fref=ts)

The Wannse Conference. January, 20th, 1942. The decision to exterminate the european jews, by the nazis.

Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the SD (Security Service) and Nazi governor of Bohemia and Moravia. Place uncertain, 1942.

— (National Archives and Records Administration, College Park, Md.)

Wannse. Where the conference took place, near Berlin.

"WANNSEE CONFERENCE AND THE 'FINAL SOLUTION' 

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On January 20, 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials gathered at a villa in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question."

Representing the SS at the meeting were: SS General Reinhard Heydrich, the chief of the Reich Security Main Office (Reichssicherheitshauptamt-RSHA) and one of Reichsführer-SS (SS chief) Heinrich Himmler's top deputies; SS Major General Heinrich Müller, chief of RSHA Department IV (Gestapo); SS Lieutenant Colonel Adolf Eichmann, chief of the RSHA Department IV B 4 (Jewish Affairs); SS Colonel Eberhard Schöngarth, commander of the RSHA field office for the Government General in Krakow, Poland; SS Major Rudolf Lange, commander of RSHA Einsatzkommando 2, deployed in Latvia in the autumn of 1941; and SS Major General Otto Hofmann, the chief of SS Race and Settlement Main Office.

Representing the agencies of the State were: State Secretary Roland Freisler (Ministry of Justice); Ministerial Director Wilhelm Kritzinger (Reich Cabinet); State Secretary Alfred Meyer (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories-German-occupied USSR); Ministerial Director Georg Leibrandt (Reich Ministry for the Occupied Eastern Territories); Undersecretary of State Martin Luther (Foreign Office); State Secretary Wilhelm Stuckart (Ministry of the Interior); State Secretary Erich Naumann (Office of Plenipotentiary for the Four-Year Plan); State Secretary Josef Bühler (Office of the Government of the Governor General-German-occupied Poland); and Ministerial Director Gerhard Klopfer (Nazi Party Chancellery).

The "Final Solution" was the code name for the systematic, deliberate, physical annihilation of the European Jews. At some still undetermined time in 1941, Hitler authorized this European-wide scheme for mass murder. Heydrich convened the Wannsee Conference (1) to inform and secure support from government ministries and other interested agencies relevant to the implementation of the “Final Solution,” and (2) to disclose to the participants that Hitler himself had tasked Heydrich and the RSHA with coordinating the operation. The men at the table did not deliberate whether such a plan should be undertaken, but instead discussed the implementation of a policy decision that had already been made at the highest level of the Nazi regime.

At the time of the Wannsee Conference, most participants were already aware that the National Socialist regime had engaged in mass murder of Jews and other civilians in the German-occupied areas of the Soviet Union and in Serbia. Some had learned of the actions of the Einsatzgruppen and other police and military units, which were already slaughtering tens of thousands of Jews in the German-occupied Soviet Union. Others were aware that units of the German Army and the SS and police were killing Jews in Serbia. None of the officials present at the meeting objected to the Final Solution policy that Heydrich announced.

Not present at the meeting were representatives of the German Armed Forces (Wehrmacht) and the Reich Railroads (Reichsbahn) in the German Ministry of Transportation. The SS and police had already negotiated agreements with the German Army High Command on the murder of civilians, including Soviet Jews, in the spring of 1941, prior to the invasion of the Soviet Union. In late September 1941, Hitler had authorized the Reich Railroads to transport German, Austrian, and Czech Jews to locations in German-occupied Poland and the German-occupied Soviet Union, where German authorities would kill the overwhelming majority of them.

Heydrich indicated that approximately 11,000,000 Jews in Europe would fall under the provisions of the "Final Solution." In this figure, he included not only Jews residing in Axis-controlled Europe, but also the Jewish populations of the United Kingdom, and the neutral nations (Switzerland, Ireland, Sweden, Spain, Portugal, and European Turkey). For Jews residing in the Greater German Reich and holding the status of subjects of the German Reich, the Nuremberg Laws would serve as a basis for determining who was a Jew.

Heydrich announced that “during the course of the Final Solution, the Jews will be deployed under appropriate supervision at a suitable form of labor deployment in the East. In large labor columns, separated by gender, able-bodied Jews will be brought to those regions to build roads, whereby a large number will doubtlessly be lost through natural reduction. Any final remnant that survives will doubtless consist of the elements most capable of resistance. They must be dealt with appropriately, since, representing the fruit of natural selection, they are to be regarded as the core of a new Jewish revival.”

The participants discussed a number of other issues raised by the new policy, including the establishment of the Theresienstadtcamp-ghetto as a destination for elderly Jews as well Jews who were disabled or decorated in World War I, the deferment until after the war of “Final Solution” measures against Jews married to non-Jews or persons of mixed descent as defined by theNuremberg laws, prospects for inducing Germany's Axis partners to give up their Jewish populations, and preparatory measures for the “evacuations.”

Despite the euphemisms which appeared in the protocols of the meeting, the aim of the Wannsee Conference was clear to its participants: to further the coordination of a policy aimed at thephysical annihilation of the European Jews.

Further Reading:

Mark Roseman, The Wannsee Conference and the Final Solution(New York: Metropolitan Books, 2002)."

(Fonte: http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/article.php?ModuleId=10005477)

Memories. The Auschwitz death march.

MEMORIES. January, 17th, 1945.

"Auschwitz Memorial / Muzeum Auschwitz.

On Jan 17, 1945 67,012 male and female prisoners of Auschwitz camps complex were present at the last evening roll-call. Evacuation of the camp was about to start. Camp doctor Josef Mengele liquidated his experimental station at sector BIIfin Birkenau camp taking all the documentation of his experiments on twins, dwarfs and disabled people with him. Burning of documents continued, including Auschwitz I camp hospital archive. On this day prisoners of two sub-camps started the evacuation: Sosnowitz and Neu-Dachs. The commandant of Auschwitz camp Richard Baer gave an order to the leaders of the evacuation columns chosen from among the members of the guard companies to liquidate ruthlessly all prisoners who attempt to escape during the evacuation or drag their feet.

It is estimated that at least 9 thousand, and more probably 15 thousand Auschwitz prisoners paid with their lives for the evacuation operation.

Learn more about the evacuation and liquidation of Auschwitz camp.

http://en.auschwitz.org.pl/h/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=14"