Alfred Hitchcock’s Holocaust documentary

The Hollywood director was already famous for his movie Lifeboat when, in 1945, he joined a group of documentary filmmakers accompanying the American and British soldiers who liberated the more than 200 camps the Nazis devoted to murdering 11 million people—6 million of them Jews.

The “carnage and desolation” has “to be seen to be believed,” says the unidentified narrator of Hitchcock’s  53 minute film. And so it is. No sensibility is spared. The film is so grisly that it was suppressed for years by the British war office. What makes it so horrible is its pitiless recording of the mass-grave burial of thousands of naked starvation victims, none of them ever identified, by their Nazi SS captors at the direction of angry Allied soldiers.

Parts of the film finally were aired in 1985 under the title “Memory of the Camps.” But Google Video is making it available in its disquieting entirety for the first time. You will share the shock (though certainly not the guilt) of the well-fed  German burgomeisters who were rounded up from local towns and made to stand and watch. If you can view the whole thing in one go, you’re braver than me. But I finally got through it, and it was worth it, especially for the contempt it generates for Holocaust deniers, Muslim and otherwise.