Description
Object description
Scenes of Ebensee Concentration Camp on 8th May 1945, and the weak, thin, surviving male inmates. The dead are being disposed of in the crematorium. Food is distributed by US soldiers. The 80th Infantry Division near Spital, Austria, moving into the Alps on 8th May 1945, as columns of German troops move out of the mountains to surrender on VE Day. Unedited scenes of the disinterment and reburial on 11th May 1945 of approximately eighty Poles, Jews and Russians who had escaped from a march, one month before, into the heart of Germany from an eastern camp. They were betrayed to the German authorities by local farmers, who are now being made to undertake this task by the US Army.
Full description
CONCENTRATION CAMP [Dope sheet title] Ebensee Concentration Camp is shown in its beautiful surroundings of mountains and lakeside pine forests. The inmates are shown being given food by the liberating US Army who direct those fit enough to continue to dispose of the dead. The crematorium is shown and the metal framed trolley which was used to transport two corpses at a time to be burnt. The liberated men are completely emaciated and stand or are held up naked in the cold air for the cameramen. The high wire fence is shown with a tall, skeletal, naked, young man standing beside it and the snow-capped mountains rising behind him. Some young men in prison stripes sleep exhaustedly on a bench, unaware of the camera close up. Food is unloaded from a US Army truck and into a hut guarded by US Army sentries, while a US tank crewman stands by in his leather helmet. The exterior of the crematorium is shown against its mountain background.
Full description
GERMAN TROOPS SURRENDER [Dope sheet title] A 76mm Sherman M4A3 tank guards a crossroads near a farmhouse while its crew relax in the sun as they wait for official confirmation of the end of the war in Europe. US troops watch surrendered German soldiers sitting on the grass, the farm carts they are travelling in parked about, the light draft horses grazing, and a girl soldier is cooking for a small group of officers and men. One soldier wearing a white coat is sitting smoking a pipe and gazes impassively into the camera. A long convoy of walking Luftwaffe men led by a horse drawn cart comes in the opposite direction on a mountain road to a rapidly advancing US Army medium Chaffee tank.
Full description
D P GRAVES [Dope sheet title] Unedited scenes at Estedt, near Gardelegen, Germany on 11th May 1945 of the disinterment, transport out of woods and reburial of seventy-five to eighty Russians, Jews and Poles, who had escaped into the woods and surrounding farms, from a column being marched from the east into central Germany on the 12th and 13th April 1945. The local farmers are alleged to have reported their presence, which resulted in Luftwaffe personnel and Paratroopers being sent in to round up and shoot the victims who were then buried in a shallow, woodland, mass grave. An already decaying, disinterred body is shown to have A7923 tattooed on its arm by the German civilians, some wearing long gloves, who have been made to do this work. A horse drawn cart carries sheeted bodies through lightly wooded farmland, local farmers, businessmen and youths are reburying the bodies now wrapped individually in white sheets in an open burial ground. When setting out to start the disinterment they are jaunty but as the work progresses they become more tired and serious.
Physical description
35mm