Death Mills (1945)

Name: Death Mills
Genre: Documentary, War & Politics
Released: 1945-07-10

22m

Running Time

Plot.

Originally made with a German soundtrack for screening in occupied Germany and Austria, this film was the first documentary to show what the Allies found when they liberated the Nazi extermination camps: the survivors, the conditions, and the evidence of mass murder. The film includes accounts of the economic aspects of the camps' operation, the interrogation of captured camp personnel, and the enforced visits of the inhabitants of neighboring towns, who, along with the rest of their compatriots, are blamed for complicity in the Nazi crimes - one of the few such condemnations in the Allied war records.

Where to Watch.

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Cast & Crew.

Anton Reimer

Narrator

Hans Burger

Director / Writer

Oskar Seidlin

Writer

Billy Wilder

Editor / Director

Media.

Details.

Release Date
July 10, 1945

Status
Released

Running Time
22m

Genres
Documentary War & Politics

Last updated: 2024-10-31

This Movie Is About.

holocaust

war propaganda

Wiki.

Death Mills (or Die Todesmühlen) is a 1945 American-German propaganda film directed by Billy Wilder and produced by the United States Department of War. The film was intended for German audiences to educate them about the atrocities committed by the Nazi regime. For the German version, Die Todesmühlen, Hanuš Burger is credited as the writer and director, while Wilder supervised the editing. Wilder is credited with directing the English-language version; however, he later said that he didn't direct anything as "there was nothing to direct".

The film is a much-abbreviated version of German Concentration Camps Factual Survey, a 1945 British government documentary that was not completed until nearly seven decades later.

The German-language version of the film was shown in the US sector of West Germany in January 1946.