Last night I watched "Death Mills". I learned a thing or two.

Screw Netflix, Prime and all the monolithic, mega-corp streaming platforms out there. This week I watched The Edge of Paradise on Plex for free with a shit ton of unforgivably timed commercial breaks. The upshot was not having Jeff Bezos' oily, rapacious maw in the back of my mind. Totally worth it. A quick search brought me to an Open Culture list of other streamable documentaries available on non-subscription platforms. Rah rah free media. As I scrolled through, I was surprised to see a familiar name in one of the descriptions:

Death Mills -- Free — Billy Wilder’s documentary in German showing what Allies found when they liberated Nazi extermination camps. (1945)

I adore everything of Billy Wilder's I've ever seen. My country is handing the reigns to a would-be authoritarian regime in a couple of weeks. Death Mills sounded relevant.

Billy Wilder and Marilyn Monroe on the set of "Some Like it Hot" (1959)

Side note: For most of my adulthood I've been able to keep certain aspects of my day-to-day reality neatly compartmentalized. Uncomfy stuff like what I pick up about American politics goes in a box to "examine later" (more like "never" if I can help it). This now seems like a luxury. A privilege I didn't realize I was receiving. Until 2020 I didn't wring my hands at every election. I just voted and coasted on with a vague but sure-enough sense that everything would work out. That when it came right down to it, I wouldn't actually lose my rights. I wouldn't be putting myself in danger of physical harm just by walking down the street.

Yeah, privilege is definitely the right word.

Since November 6th an increasing number of individuals out in public seem to be exuding a palpable tension. This is energy of a very particular tenor, it's on the offensive in the extreme. I don't think it's because I smoked that one joint and got a little paranoid. There's hard visual evidence too. Traveling from Southern California to Southern Oregon last week I passed someone wearing a "FUCK YOUR FEELINGS" t-shirt, a private property sign reading "TRUMP WON - FAFO", and a large confederate flag billowing from a pick up truck emblazoned with the message "I'M NOT COMING DOWN". Those were just a few of the beauts glimpsed on my trip up the Left Coast. 

I've also spent time thinking about how some history gets "memory-holed".  I'm working on a short documentary about environmental activism in the 90s, and I know from interview subjects that particular direct action events were covered by major news outlets, but said coverage is nowhere to be found in online archives. Possibly just not digitized -- more likely trashed, taped over. Maybe simply to make room for new news. To whit, we didn't always have the seemingly-limitless storage capacity of the cloud. Occasionally the fat had to be trimmed, as I understand from the elders. But I wonder if the nature of its content doomed some slices of recorded history. Maybe whoever was doing the culling just didn't like the look of that 20-year-old hippie getting her head bashed in while u-locked to a logging truck. A little tasteless. A little embarrassing for a particular corporation or individual or mindset. So into the bin, and over the fine line of suppression. And these are just the sins of omission -- let's not even talk about outright AI historical revisions, complete with their hyper-real composited images (aka hard visual evidence).

Reality is subjective. Certain trees fall in the forest -- unless, of course, all the witnesses are dead, never told their stories, or the tape just doesn't exist.

I recently learned  of a belief that if you can do nothing else, simply bearing witness is a crucial part of activism. In light of where we are, where I am, and where we may be headed after January 20th, I decided it was a fine night to witness one of the most heinous atrocities in human history with Billy Wilder holding my hand. I also had no idea he'd made a documentary about the holocaust and was simply curious. 

"Death Mills" - come for the Wilder, stay for the face of fascism

Half of me wishes I'd never seen this thing. The other half of me is pretty sure it arrived right on time by Provident Magic of the Universe. Death Mills is a reality check of the highest order. Although I've been fearful these past weeks, seeing ultranationalism's end-game was clarifying. As in: I have no other option but to resist this horror in every way within my power and personal value system. And resist it to the death -- since what's on the line, ultimately, is our lives. This unhumorous irony is what Wilder's film (if it can be called his) shows. 

Death Mills is composed of footage taken by US Armed Forces cameramen at the liberation of Dachau on April 29th, 1945, as well as other concentration camps. Its 20 minutes are a fraction of the 37+ hours of  footage held by the National Archives, according to this article by their Motion Picture Lab preservation supervisor Criss Austin. Regarding the provenance of the film, Austin's article cites an affidavit by Isidore Siegel, Chief of the US Army Pictorial Center Legal Office:
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"Footage utilized in said documentary was originally photographed by Armed Forces Cameramen in the European Theater of Operations and shipped directly to the U.S. Army Pictorial Center. The footage was edited into a documentary film at the U.S. Army Pictorial Center.  Subsequently, the film was loaned to the Office of War Information which re-edited the same to produce the German language film, ‘Todes Muhlen.’ The said film without additional editing was rescored by the U.S. Army Pictorial center into the English language film entitled, ‘Death Mills,’ which is also known as ‘Mills of Death.’ "

A liberated child shows their identification tattoo in "Death Mills"

According to Criss Austin's article referenced above, Todes Muhlen or Die Todesmühlen (the original German version) was "written and directed" by  Hanuš Burger (or Hans Burger if you're looking at IMDB). At the time the film was made, Burger was 36 years old. Online English-language sources are rather thin, but there is a German article from the DEFA-Foundation on his fascinating, brave life here. What follows is a brief recap:

Born in Prague in 1909, Burger relocated with his family to Germany when he was 11. In Frankfurt am Main he graduated high school and quickly ditched a shoe-making apprenticeship for the theater. There his interests in design, dramaturgy, directing and writing flourished. In his early 20s he worked professionally as a dramaturg, stage designer and theater director, also penning plays and at least one screenplay. He mingled with left-wing actors and co-founded a Bertolt Brecht club as well as a club for Czech-German stage employees. He explored the experimental theater scene, was active in the Czechoslovakian Communist party, wrote articles about his experiences in theater, became the editor of a journal, and worked under a pseudonym as a courier to Berlin.

At 29 Burger collaborated with American documentarian Herbert Kline on Crisis (1939), a film documenting the 1938 German Reich's annexation of Sudetenland,  Czechoslovakia, and the resistance response that followed. After the footage for Crisis was shot, Burger participated in smuggling it out of Czechoslovakia. The film was completed in New York in 1939, and swiftly named best picture of the year by the National Board of Review. One of the first anti-Hitler documentaries ever made, Crisis has since been restored by the MoMA and is available for purchase on Blu-ray with a short clip online here.

After fleeing Europe in 1938 Burger taught at NYU and continued to make documentaries. An application to the US army was initially rejected because of his known communist activities, but he was later drafted and served overseas in the Propaganda and Psychological Warfare Detachment. He eventually turned his experiences with the army into the non-fiction novel 1212 Sends. After winning an Academy Award for his documentary short First Steps in 1948, he continued to direct throughout the 1950s and 60s, even as he left America to avoid scrutiny by HUAC. In 1965 he helmed the feature Nichts als Sünde (English title: Nothing But Sin), a musical adaptation of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which he had originally directed for the stage. He was still working in television as late as 1977, and died in Munich in 1990 at the age of 81.

And after typing all that, I still think it doesn't do justice to what I read in the DEFA-Foundation's article about Burger. Let's just say he was an artist, an activist, a teacher, an army man, an ex-pat. An enfant terrible, a polymath. A virtuoso.

Hanuš Burger

And yet, Billy Wilder is "often credited as the director of the English version" of Death Mills, according to Criss Austin. Also according to Austin, it's likely that Burger and Wilder collaborated on editing Die Todesmühlen, although the DEFA article suggests that Wilder was only brought in later to supervise. The internet is a bit murky on how the two really partnered up for Death Mills. Perhaps it's covered in a Wilder biography, or perhaps it's in the ol' memory hole. Billy is known to have travelled to and served in Berlin at the close of WWII "as a colonel in the US Army's Division of Psychological Warfare charged with helping to assess and rebuild Germany’s film industry," according to this paper. He was also on a personal hunt for information about his mother, grandmother and step-father, all of whom lost their lives to the Nazis' juggernaut.
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As for the footage in Die Todesmühlen, Austin asserts that it was taken as "a record of events, for troop education, use in war crimes trials, and for other educational purposes."

Like teaching those of us privileged not to know, what genocide really looks like.

Death Mills is relentless and hallucinogenic in its brutality. It is a parade of human skeletons, some living, some dead, some somewhere in between. Orphans raise their sleeves to show tattooed identification numbers as a voiceover intones that many of them have forgotten their own names. Death chambers abound. Despicable signage. Vats of wedding rings, watches, dentures and gold fillings, ripped from their owners' hands, wrists, mouths. Piles upon piles upon piles upon close-ups of faces in piles upon piles of corpses. So many heaped dead that I found myself choking on demented near-laughter -- how can this be real, this is absurd, a trick of the camera, there can't possibly be that many bodies, it must be fake.

It's not fake. This is real news, baby. It all really happened.

Female survivors in "Death Mills"

I can't imagine Death Mills garnering less than an NC-17 rating if it were shown publicly today. Except for the most tame excerpts, I can't imagine it being shown at all, which is why I think it's worth watching. It tells the fate of the frog sitting in the pot of water -- the frog who starts to perspire uncomfortably but never gets out to see that the burner's turned all the way up.

Let's not memory-hole the past. Let's not sugar-coat the present or look the other way in the future. That's why Die Todesmühlen was made in the first place. To show us, lest we stray again, how our humanity is at stake.

Stream Death Mills on an empty stomach and for free through the National Archives: ​https://catalog.archives.gov/id/36082

Opening titles of "Death Mills"