On April 15, 1945, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen—a Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany—and uncovered a living nightmare. What they found that day would etch itself into the annals of human horror: more than 60,000 starving, diseased inmates and over 10,000 unburied, decomposing corpses scattered across the grounds. The stench of death hung thick in the air. The scenes were so horrifying that even hardened soldiers reportedly wept or vomited.
Among those soldiers were Sergeants Mike Lewis and Bill Lawrie, members of the British Army’s Film and Photographic Unit. Armed not just with rifles but with cameras, they documented everything. Their haunting footage showed the skeletal inmates, the mass graves, the SS guards forced to handle corpses under Allied supervision, and the shattered infrastructure of a death machine finally halted. These images were not just evidence—they became an indictment.
The British government initially used the footage for propaganda purposes and as legal proof at the Nuremberg Trials. It revealed to the world the true scale and depravity of Nazi atrocities. However, much of the raw material—particularly the more graphic and disturbing segments—was deemed too horrific for public viewing in the postwar era. Since the 1950s, those reels have remained largely locked away in the archives of London’s Imperial War Museum.
Now, as the 80th anniversary of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation approaches, these lost images will finally be seen. Thanks to Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes, known for films like 1917 and Skyfall, the footage will be broadcast in a new BBC documentary that combines restored archival film with survivor testimonies and commentary from historians and military personnel.
Mendes, who has long been fascinated with World War II history, took on the project not only to honor those who suffered and died but to remind future generations of what unchecked hatred and bureaucracy can do. “This is not just a historical document,” Mendes said in a press release. “It’s a warning.”
The broadcast will include footage never before shown on television: piles of naked corpses bulldozed into trenches, children lying beside the dead, and British medical teams scrambling to contain the typhus epidemic raging through the camp. In one scene, former inmates try to form lines for food, barely able to stand. In another, British soldiers burn down the wooden barracks, now crawling with lice and disease.
Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, but it became a site of unimaginable suffering due to starvation, neglect, and disease. Among its most famous victims was Anne Frank, who died there just weeks before liberation. The footage captured by Lewis and Lawrie shows the world that this wasn’t abstract evil—it was human bodies, human screams, human death.