Imperial War Museum’s verdict on unearthed Holocaust footage from April 1945

The Imperial War Museum has hailed newly-unearthed Holocaust footage from April 1945 showing Jews liberated from a train bound for Theresienstadt for shedding fresh light on the final days of Nazi terror. 

The two minutes of black and white film, revealed last week by the National Archives in the United States, shows three cattle car trains, each with 2,500 survivors on board, heading from Bergen-Belsen to Theresienstadt on 7 April 1945. The prisoners, called Austauschjuden (“exchange Jews”), had been selected because the SS thought they could be swapped for German prisoners of war.

After six days of travel, in horrifying conditions, the train stopped outside the village of Farsleben, 80 miles west of Berlin, where it was liberated by American soldiers.

The footage shows some prisoners looking malnourished and wearing bandages, many sitting or lying motionless.

James Bulgin, head of public history at the Imperial War Museum, told Jewish News: “This footage is amazing in terms of what it shines a light on. It’s powerful to go from being fixed photographic images to suddenly seeing moving images that join the gaps.”

He said the film will allow historians to challenge misconceptions about the nature of liberation at the end of the Nazi era: “Liberation took many forms at the end of the Holocaust, but the popular perception of it has been dominated by a relatively limited volume of content that focuses on specific places, predominantly Bergen Belsen.

“Ironically, that’s where this train had come from, but also places like Mauthausen and Dachau. Hopefully this footage will start to change these perceptions and show how diverse liberation was for Europe’s Jews.”

This footage is amazing in terms of what it shines a light on. It’s powerful to go from being fixed photographic images to suddenly seeing moving images that join the gaps.

For Bulgin, one of the most powerful aspects of the film is that it “focuses on the Jewish experience of liberation”. He adds: “It’s not filmed from over the shoulders of liberating armies, showing the soldiers as valiant and glorious. It’s just focused on the individuals. In the image of the small boy staring at the camera you get a sense of the unspoken horror. You look at him and think,‘What have those eyes seen?’ Surely far more than a child of that age ever, ever should have.”

Bulgin added that “there’s still this sort of broader perception in the public at large that the Nazis, as soon as the war broke out, somehow got a hold of every Jew in Europe and threw them into a concentration camp where they were all kind of somehow systematically murdered. And I think the problem with that is, it is obviously, completely wrong.

“But also it denies quite how much individual action was involved. Because for something like this to really happen, it needs the active participation of tens of thousands of other people, knowingly, willingly, actively participating, and the idea that there’s slightly more consideration or forethought, to me really sharpens how horrific it all was. If we just indulged that it was this massive, faceless thing that happened, somehow of its own volition, it doesn’t acknowledge that sufficiently. And there’s something about the idea that they’ve made a decision about exchanging and selling Jewish people in this camp.”

Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Educational Trust, said: “This footage is nothing short of remarkable. This is the first time we’ve been able to see on film the people swept up in these extraordinary events – the liberation of one of the so called ‘death trains’ from Bergen-Belsen.

“This footage brings to life this history, reminding us to look beyond the nameless, faceless statistics of the past and to remember the Jewish men, women and children persecuted, imprisoned and murdered by the Nazis. Through this film we have a window on to a pivotal moment in history and are able to be witnesses to a past that is rapidly fading.”