Capturing the Evidence Belsen Camera Report

As Allied forces advanced into Germany from late 1944, Bergen-Belsen concentration camp became a collection point for tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from other camps; many of them survivors of ‘death marches’. In the camps liberated before Belsen, attempts had been made by the SS to destroy evidence and liquidate most prisoners. For example, when Auschwitz was liberated in January 1945 only 6,000 survivors remained. But by the time British and Canadian forces entered Belsen on April 15, 1945, there were 60,000 people starving, sick and dying in the camp. Thousands of unburied bodies lay strewn on the ground, some of them living skeletons near indistinguishable from the dead around them. Film footage captured the horrific landscape of death, and Bergen-Belsen emerged in 1945 as a symbol of Nazi terror and the Holocaust.

The film taken during the liberation and relief of Bergen-Belsen was used in the Belsen war crimes trial at Lüneburg in September 1945, and was the first use of film as corroboratory evidence. A compilation, supported by affidavits from the Cameramen, was screened in the courtroom.

Mike Lewis, the son of Polish Jews who had come to Britain before the First World War, was one of the Cameramen who filmed the liberation of Bergen-Belsen as part of the British Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU).

The first AFPU team to arrive on 15 April consisted of Sergeants Lewis and Bill Lawrie (film), and Sergeant Harry Oakes and Lieutenant Dick Wilson (stills). They continued coverage until 26 April 1945, when another team took over.

Lewis was profoundly affected by his experiences at Belsen, and kept an archive of material related to his role in capturing evidence of the “horror camp”. His archive, including his war diary, testimony and a number of photographs and film stills, was donated to the Sydney Jewish Museum in 2019.

Part of Lewis’ material reports from the Army Film and Photographic Centre (REF:-AFPC/66/2/87/GL), which already in May 1945 acknowledge the extreme importance of his footage as evidence.