History Center exhibit shows footage shot amid death camps’ liberation

The latest exhibit at the Atlanta History Center focuses on the men who filmed the horrors of Nazi Germany's concentration camps.

But the real stars are the dead. It is a cast of millions.

They are lifeless mountains of arms and legs and unseeing eyes. They are clumps in the snow. They are charred remains. They are the horror reflected on the faces of German civilians forced to visit the camps to look at them, the dead, the millions of the dead, the dead dead dead.

The history center's newest exhibit, "Filming the Camps — John Ford, Samuel Fuller, George Stevens: From Hollywood to Nuremberg," opens May 6, the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Falkenau camp in Germany toward the end of World War II. It runs through Nov. 20, when Nazi atrocities went on trial in Nuremberg.

The Memorial de la Shoah in Paris created the exhibit. The history center is one of two American venues hosting it.

“Filming the Camps” is a grim look at a horrific moment in world history when Nazi Germany rounded up millions of people it decreed undesirable — Jews, gays, political dissidents, others who weren’t wanted. With gas and bullets and fire, the Nazis killed them.

But their crimes could not remain buried. When Allied forces liberated some camps in 1945, camera crews were with them to document what had happened during the Third Reich’s reign. Much of that imagery can be credited to three men.

A video of a 1968 interview with Fuller offers an infantryman’s view of war. Fuller, whose military service in World War II included North Africa, is unflinching in his recollections.

“Boom! Wham! Wham!” Fuller, his face topped by a shock of white hair, grimaces. “There’s nothing (left) but pieces of people.”

Ford, a renowned director before and after the war, adds a few thoughts. "It's the little man," he says in a separate interview, "who does the courageous things."

Ford was in the U.S. Naval Reserve when he was tapped in 1939 to head the FPB, or Field Photographic Branch. The director of the “Grapes of Wrath” (1940) began training specialists to film military actions. By 1941, he had 60. During the war, Ford oversaw the production of two Oscar-winning documentaries about the attack on Pearl Harbor and the sea battle at Midway. At war’s end, he coordinated the production of a film used as evidence in the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg.

Before the war, Stevens was renowned for films showcasing Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. During the war, his 45-man crew — the "Hollywood Irregulars" — covered the D-Day landing and the Allied push into the heart of Europe.

Fuller, a soldier in the 1st Infantry Division, used a 16 mm camera his mother gave him to film the liberation of Falkenau, a camp attached to a larger complex of concentration camps in Bavaria, Germany. His experiences with the 1st formed his postwar career, too. He wrote and directed "The Big Red One," a 1980 film about the division's World War II exploits.

This latest exhibit dovetails with the history center’s longtime mission of showcasing veterans, said Kate Whitman, the center’s vice president of public programs.

“At the forefront, it’s about veterans,” she said. “It (the exhibit) fits nicely with that.”

It’s not an easy exhibit to visit, she admitted. That’s by design, too. Past exhibits at the center have focused on slavery, Atlanta’s 1906 race riots, the removal of Native Americans, and more.

In a departure from most traditional exhibits, this latest feature is devoid of bright colors. With the exception of Fuller’s film, shot in color, everything is black-and-white. Even the fixtures used in the display lack vibrancy. That is no oversight, Whitman said.

“It’s a somber subject, a somber exhibit,” she said. “We’re paying homage to this by having things a little bit darker.”

Most artifacts are chilling in their simplicity. Consider the typed sheets that detail every scene in a film about the discovery and liberation of Dachau. More than 30,000 prisoners died there.

“Shot of naked men (very skinny) taking showers,” reads an entry on one sheet.

“‘Brausebad’ — ‘gas chamber.’ An interior view,” reads another.

There are photos, too. They are history at its unvarnished worst. One shows a clothesline, so heavily laden with apparel that it looks as if it might snap. Their owners took them off for a shower, not knowing they were walking into a gas chamber.

A snippet of film offers a description of a Dachau chamber. It features a close shot of a device with a handle. “A hand valve,” says a voice, “to regulate (gas) pressure.”

Another segment focuses on naked men. They are so thin that their hips and ribs and shoulder sockets are a series of sharp angles. They look at the camera with sunken eyes. They sway on legs that may snap at any moment. “These,” says a voice, “are the survivors.”

Those who didn’t survive are the bodies beside the railway, the figures that snow cannot hide, the charred bones. “Dachau,” the voice intones, “factory of horrors.”

“Filming the Camps” is suitable for people as young as middle school, Whitman said. It can be taken in as quickly as 30 minutes, or may take all day to absorb.