HBO, with the supervision and assistance of Brits (Helena Bonham-Carter narrated, and the Imperial War Museum played a part), threw a bone to “Zionists” this week by airing a documentary about an unfinished film about the Allied liberation of death camps in Germany and Poland. The news value was ostensibly that the film that Sidney Bernstein had put together to provide “evidence” to dubious Germans was shelved owing to the Cold War. The title “Night Will Fall” refers to the final words: should the world choose barbarism of the type shown throughout the doc, civilization will be kaput, hence “night will fall.” (As if we are already civilized.)
Algemeiner, a Jewish website and newspaper, criticized the television offering by noting that the word “Jew” was omitted, but then went on to say that other victims of Nazi barbarism were neglected, such as gypsies and homosexuals, thus minimizing the power of antisemitism in Nazi Germany, especially after the failure of Operation Barbarossa (according to Saul Friedlander, though this time-line is contested. Algemeiner also neglected to mention the mentally ill or “socially disabled”, emphasized in Michael Burleigh’s and Wolfgang Wipperman’s The Racial State); see http://tinyurl.com/k2bwbph.).
Actually, there was no doubt that Jewish deaths were the subject of the film, for there were so many scenes of corpses and interviews with Jewish survivors, that I suspected a possibly sadistic motive to the filmmakers. But the all too obvious necrophilia was not the worst flaw in the documentary.
Although it was mentioned that survivors in the British and American zones of conquered Germany were herded together, with many wishing to go to Palestine, there was zero discussion of the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry (1946) that inspected these camps and the British Mandate too, but disappointing Harry Truman, who wanted 100,000 refugees to be admitted to Palestine, as it was then called. For it was the British Labour Party’s Foreign Secretary, the arguably antisemitic Ernest Bevin, who put the kibosh on that idea, against the recommendations of the Committee! (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anglo-American_Committee_of_Inquiry). As Wiki tells you, the Brits then turned over the problem of Jewish immigration to Palestine to the United Nations, but it is questionable whether they ever intended to abandon the Mandate (see https://clarespark.com/2014/05/17/miracle-man-ralph-bunche-saves-the-un/), for a Jewish state of the kind achieved in the war of 1948 frustrated their desire for an air base in the Negev that would compensate for the evacuation from Egypt and the imminent loss of India.
Perhaps the reader will dismiss my last paragraph as irrelevant to the project of the film. But it is less arguable that the HBO claim that the Allies were clueless about death camps until 1944, is a blatant cover-up of the historical record. It is true that there were doubters, owing to the existence of German atrocity reports during WW1, but by 1942 at the latest, there was no doubt that the Jews of Europe were being murdered. (See https://clarespark.com/2013/12/07/ben-hecht-v-ben-urwand-the-un-jewish-left-and-assimilated-jews/, also https://clarespark.com/2009/12/13/klara-hitlers-son-and-jewish-blood/.)
Finally, in one sequence, women are shown eagerly looking for new clothes as women are wont to do; this supposedly started the process of “healing.” I found this offensive; survivors notoriously never heal, and their family relations, should they be so lucky to have families, usually suffer accordingly, as any psychologist will tell you.
Orwell complained bitterly about the lies perpetuated by journalists and other authorities after the Spanish Civil War. HBO’s contribution to Holocaust Remembrance Day only confirms the notion that the Holocaust is unrepresentable, at least by liberals and leftists.
The Clare Spark Blog 