German Concentration Camps Factual Survey

German Concentration Camps Factual Survey is the official British documentary film on the Nazi concentration camps, based on footage shot by the Allied forces in 1945.

The film was produced by Sidney Bernstein, then with the British Ministry of Information, with Alfred Hitchcock acting as a "treatment advisor". The script was written by Richard Crossman and Colin Wills. Soviet filmmaker Sergei Nolbandov was production supervisor.

The project was abandoned in September 1945, and the film was left unfinished for nearly seventy years. The film's restoration was completed by film scholars at the Imperial War Museum. The finished film had its world premiere early in 2014 at the Berlin Film Festival, and was shown in a limited number of venues in 2015. It was released in North America in 2017.

The British government shelved the film without showing it to the public, and questions have been raised about the extent to which political considerations, such as British concern about Zionism or changes in German occupation policy, may have played in the film being withheld.

Sidney Bernstein, a cinema entrepreneur, had been an advisor to the Ministry of Information since 1940, and from 1942 onwards had been in charge of supply of British films to cinemas in areas freed from Axis control. Early in 1945, he began to make inquiries about the availability of Soviet films showing scenes of German atrocities.

Bernstein visited the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 22 April 1945, a week after it was liberated by British forces. What he saw there made him determined to make the film to show to German audiences. Production of the film was ordered by the Psychological Warfare Division (PWD) which was a unit of the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force (SHAEF). The PWD was responsible for the political activities in Germany of the British Ministry of Information and its U.S. counterpart, the Office of War Information. Bernstein began to assembly his film production team in April 1945. He and the U.S. Information Control Division were the driving forces behind the film in its early stages.