Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

by Mark Harris

  Stevens felt bound to use his camera to make the unspeakable manifest, even as he felt nothing but endless despair. After the war, he wondered, for the rest of his life, if he had filmed enough, if he had brought to the task before him the ruthlessness and skill it required. “Strange thing,” he said. “When you find things are at their worst, and [it’s] most necessary to film, you can’t do it the way you should do it. You can’t walk up to a man that think[s] of rescue, and . . . stick a camera in his face.” But he pressed on, and he did much of the most painful work himself, allowing nobody to replace or relieve him. “You can send three or four guys out with some weapons to do something, but I couldn’t send anybody into the goddamn boxcar,” he recalled. “I had to do it. And I climbed up on this thing, and people [who were alive] a few days before, they’re all piled up. . . . One just couldn’t know . . . it just doesn’t relate to people, how they should be all piled up on top of one another.” While he was at Dachau, he would not speak of what he saw and filmed, even to the men in his unit. “Particularly with G.I.’s, you don’t talk about those things,” he said. “You don’t say, ‘I saw this . . .’ You file it. So I’m here, and I’m looking at these people, who they are, and what—and I know this was never written—cannibalism. In the boxcar. Jesus Christ, how does one . . . I never heard anybody ever talk about it.”

  Ultimately, it was the living who haunted Stevens more than the dead. He would walk into a field with his camera and see what he thought were bodies racked by malnutrition and covered with sores; then some of them would begin to move. His stomach would turn; he would rear back. The dead were everywhere, intermingled with the living. Their smell hung in the air, but in the Allies’ first days at the camp, as one young American soldier after another would double over heaving, the survivors themselves seemed not to react. They had lived and slept and eaten among corpses for so long that they continued to do so, almost as if they didn’t notice them. The Allies had not anticipated the amount of humanitarian aid that would be needed. They quickly put the Germans they had taken prisoner to work carrying supplies and buckets of water, and young GIs taught the camp inmates who were well enough to stand how to make themselves meal-and-water mush in small outdoor cauldrons while they waited for the first truckloads of bread to arrive. Some of the people at Dachau were so used to imprisonment and punishment that they could barely tell their liberators from their captors. “I would come around a block and there would be one of these poor devils, stricken, standing there shaking and trembling,” Stevens said. “I’ve got the uniform on, and he thinks I’m going to do some kind of outrage on him. We take off our tin hats and try to look as [un-]soldier-like as possible, but they’d just stand at attention and salute . . . in a paroxysm of terror . . . begging you not to be a beast. . . . Every time you turn a corner, because of your uniform, people think of you like that. . . . You want to escape them, push them aside. You don’t want to catch their lice.”

  In his first days at Dachau, Stevens felt he was losing another piece of his own humanity every time he opened his eyes. The prisoners lived like animals, unembarrassed when they squatted to relieve themselves or when they were stripped to be disinfected or photographed as living proof of war crimes. Harry Truman had been president for just a few weeks when he received a devastating report of conditions in the liberated camps from the delegate he had appointed to inspect them. Help and food were not arriving quickly enough and the freed prisoners were still suffering terribly; “as matters now stand,” the report to Truman stated, “we appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them, except that we do not exterminate them.”

  It had been almost a year since Normandy, and Stevens had grown close to the men in his unit, but at Dachau, even as they did their jobs, the team seemed to come apart; every man was alone. “Almost everybody was in shock,” Stevens said. “There wasn’t anybody I could communicate with.” When a freed inmate crawling with bugs would claw at his uniform and look at him with supplication, imploring him for something he didn’t understand in Polish or German or begging in a few words of broken English, he would have to fight the instinct to pull away in revulsion. “Everything evil will be exposed in a day in a concentration camp,” he said. “I hated the bastards [in the German army]. What they stood for was the worst, the worst possible thing that happened in centuries. And yet, when a poor man hungered and unseeing because his eyesight is failing grabs me and starts begging, I feel the Nazi in any human being . . . I feel a Nazi because I abhor him and I want him to keep his hands off me. And the reason I abhor him is because I see myself as being capable of arrogance and brutality to keep him off me. . . . That’s a fierce thing to discover within yourself, that which you despise the most.”

  Even at moments when Stevens could push the images of need and hunger and fear out of his mind, the words of the German prisoners that the Allies had taken at Dachau would echo as a kind of mocking affirmation of his own worst fears. At one point, Stevens walked into a room in one of the camp buildings where American officers were interrogating an SS officer who had been hiding in the back of a wagon bound for Munich until a freed Polish prisoner had spotted him and somehow found the strength to drag him back. The German was on his knees, screaming, as a GI stood above him with a rifle butt, ready to strike. Other captured Germans were crowded into a corner of the room, waiting for their own interrogations. “Americans are supposed to be honorable people!” cried the man on the floor. “They’re dirty torturers!”

  In his movies, from the Laurel and Hardy shorts to Alice Adams, Stevens, who had been acutely sensitive to instances of embarrassment or personal mortification since he was a small boy, had often turned episodes of humiliation into the stuff of slapstick or light farce. Moffat, who was with him at Dachau, believed that during Stevens’s time at the camp, he came to feel that his work in transforming moments of cruelty or hurt into popular comic entertainment made him somehow culpable. “He’d always been an observer of human frailty,” he said, “[as] a sort of picaresque, minor thing. It was never enlarged onto the tragic scale that he suddenly saw [of] people behaving and being treated in fashions that he’d never dreamed that human nature [would allow]. He took it very very hard . . . it had a profound effect on him.”

  He kept filming, even when his instinct was to turn away. Only a small portion of what he photographed was deemed suitable for use in American newsreels, and even the limited amount of footage that was sent out by the army was rejected by many theater owners as inappropriate for their audiences. One of the few pieces of Dachau footage that many moviegoers at home saw at the time was an event that was then taking place all over Germany: Whenever a camp was liberated, the Allies would gather adult men and women from the surrounding German villages and towns, put them in army trucks, and take them on a nonoptional tour of the scene of Nazi crimes. Stevens filmed these visits with particular attention to the faces of the visitors, training his camera on them to see who would eventually break down and cry, and who would set his jaw and refuse to look at anything but the back of the head of the man in front of him. He seemed to know before it happened which middle-aged woman was likely to pull a handkerchief from her purse and hold it to her mouth in shock, and which would simply press her lips together and shake her head quickly as if to deny the reality of what was before her. He also filmed GIs escorting prisoners up and down a line of suspected camp guards, some of whom had thrown away their uniforms, shaved their heads, and dressed in striped pajamas, hoping to evade capture. As the prisoners, some of whom were virtually blind from the conditions in which they’d lived, moved closer to their former captors, peering at them, Stevens moved in with prosecutorial determination, bringing his camera so close that both faces filled the frame. Sometimes he would not move the camera or cut away; he would simply hold fast on a single image until his film ran out, as if all of the deep and essential proofs that anyone could possibly require resided in the faces, or the bodies, or the bones themselves.

  After t
he first few days, signs of civilization—food, blankets, doctors, medicine—started to reach the camp, and the freed prisoners there, many of whom stayed because they had no families left and no place they could now call home, became more used to the presence of cameras. They understood why they were being photographed, and even the sickliest among them tried to summon the strength to cooperate. In the infirmaries, men with sunken eyes and hollow cheeks would, when they saw Stevens’s cameras, move toward even frailer patients who were too weak to raise their heads, and cup the backs of their skulls, gently lifting them to face the lens so that they might be seen or remembered by someone, as unrecognizable as many of them had become. In the makeshift morgues, the prisoners would hold up dead men for Stevens to film; they too were evidence. And many of the men in the camp gave testimony on camera; Stevens himself interviewed former prisoners. He received no instructions from the military to elicit testimony from them or to film it; he believed it was part of the job he was there to do and was certain that it would eventually be needed.

  Some of the Dachau inmates asked for a religious service, and on May 5, Captain David Eichorn, a Jewish army chaplain, and Rabbi Eli Bohnen conducted a Jewish service as part of a larger memorial ceremony that was attended by thousands of former prisoners (the next day, a delayed Easter mass was held). Stevens took sound film from the vantage points of both the pulpit and the crowd, which stood raptly beneath flags of more than a dozen Allied nations as they heard the words, “Europe has suffered with you.” Stevens, who had been raised Protestant, shuddered at some of what was said; Dachau caused him, for a time, to turn away from any religious faith, particularly from the “wholesomely, exuberantly schmaltzy” Christianity practiced by the Germans that he saw. Twenty years later, he recalled that what he had felt then was, “The better the Christian, the better the anti-Semite. . . . It justified the whole goddamned terror, to have this kind of a [Christian] belief. They wanted to have it, and they had it.”

  Two nights later, the war in Europe ended. Still at Dachau, Stevens, along with the rest of the army, heard the news of V-E Day on the radio the same way they had learned of Roosevelt’s death a month earlier and Hitler’s suicide just as they entered the camp. There was no celebration that evening. They listened to Churchill tell the world that the German government had signed an agreement of unconditional surrender that was approved by the Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force and the Soviet high command, and they heard President Truman mark the “solemn but glorious hour” of victory by saying, “Our rejoicing is sober and subdued by a supreme consciousness of the terrible price we have paid to rid the world of Hitler and his evil band.” He reminded the world that “work, work, and more work” lay ahead. But the fighting in Europe was, at last, over.

  Stevens stayed on at Dachau for several weeks, continuing to film and to send footage back to London and Washington. At the end of each week, he would sit alone and write a log to be sent to the War Department detailing what was on each reel of footage: “Closeups of the prisoners—very good of their faces,” “More dead bodies—closeups of their heads,” “Shot of naked prisoners shivering with the cold.” He wasn’t in any hurry to return to the United States; more than at any time since he had entered the war, he believed that his job was essential; everything else, including thoughts of his future, would have to wait. When he finally left the camp in July, it was to serve as an American delegate to the Potsdam Conference at which Truman, Churchill, and Stalin gathered to map out postwar policy. He and some of his men drove to Hitler’s retreat at Berchtesgaden, in the Alps near the German-Austrian border, to take some of the spoils of war—silverware and dinner plates. (He eventually brought what he had pilfered to Paris and, he said, traded it for cognac.) They went into Goering’s house and saw his underground screening room, where a list of motion pictures that had been projected there was posted; Stevens couldn’t resist looking to see if any of his movies were on it. And in Berlin, he filmed the Olympiad stadium, where Leni Riefenstahl had shot her famous documentary for Hitler nine years earlier, and he saw the trench in which Hitler and Eva Braun had died. That footage was the last recorded work of his SPECOU unit, which had now fractured into small subgroups. After leaving Dachau, Stevens began drinking heavily; the remaining men in his unit found him “troublesome” and “difficult” when he wasn’t sober and they started to steer clear of him. “As soon as we were off duty, as soon as night fell, we’d avoid him,” said Moffat. “He’d come out looking for company, somebody for a chat, or to drink and open his rations with, and he couldn’t find anybody. . . . He was lonely.”

  The unit broke up. The rest of the men wanted to go home. Stevens filmed young Allied soldiers leaving Germany, joyously boarding planes bound for half a dozen different countries, but he stayed on; there was too much still to do. On August 8, the London Charter defined the charges that would be brought against captured members of the European Axis powers who were to be tried that winter at Nuremberg—war crimes, crimes against peace, and crimes against humanity. Stevens and Budd Schulberg would remain in Europe until then to assist Supreme Court associate justice Robert Jackson and his team of prosecutors. In the coming months, Stevens would devote himself to the creation of two feature-length documentaries about the war. The first would cover crimes and conditions at Dachau and other camps; the second, The Nazi Plan, would demonstrate that Germany’s war crimes were the result of more than a decade of planning and premeditation. The films were intended to have only one showing, and only one audience: the judges at Nuremberg.

  TWENTY-SIX

  “What’s This Picture For?”

  WASHINGTON AND HOLLYWOOD, SUMMER 1945

  As the war ended in Europe, the Signal Corps sent a filmed message to American soldiers stationed there: “The German people are not our friends.” In the spring, certain that Hitler’s end was imminent, Frank Capra and Theodor Geisel had prepared a short movie called Your Job in Germany that was intended for the U.S. troops who would soon be charged with keeping the peace in a defeated nation. More than any other propaganda film that had been shown during the war, this one placed the blame squarely at the feet of the German citizenry. “Take no chances,” the narrator warned. “You are up against German history. It isn’t good.” In a voice-over that sneered at the notion that Germans were “tender, repentant, sorry,” Geisel made clear that he thought any show of contrition was a ruse. “It can happen again—the next war,” his narrator said, because “Gestapo gangsters” are now “part of the mob. Still watching you, and hating you, and thinking . . . thinking about next time. . . . They’re not sorry they caused the war. They’re only sorry they lost it. . . . Trust none of them. Someday the German people might be cured of their disease—their super-race disease, their world conquest disease. But they must prove that they have been cured beyond a shadow of a doubt before they are allowed to take their place among respectable nations.”

  Geisel, who wrote and produced Your Job in Germany, hired the actor John Lund to deliver those lines in an aggressive, almost menacing style. (Ronald Reagan had auditioned but, according to Geisel, “didn’t seem to have the understanding, that morning, of the vital issues.”) He stood by the harsh, unsparing tone of the film he had created, with one exception. After Germany surrendered, Eisenhower mandated a strict nonfraternization policy between U.S. soldiers and German civilians. Geisel thought the rule was “impossible and ill-advised,” but, “acting under orders,” he inserted army language telling GIs and officers that while they were to respect German customs, religion, and property, they were also to remain aloof: “Don’t visit their homes. . . . They cannot come back into the civilized fold just by sticking out their hand and saying they’re sorry. . . . That is the hand that heiled Adolf Hitler. . . . Don’t clasp that hand.”

  Capra told Geisel to fly to Europe and show Your Job in Germany to the military leadership, who would then decide if it was appropriate viewing for the rank and file. Patton, who advocated an approach that woul
d make the German people partners in peace, was disgusted by the film’s combative tone and walked out of the screening, calling it “bullshit.” But Eisenhower thought the general was too soft on denazification, and after Patton publicly referred to the National Socialists as just another political party, he warned him to “get off your bloody ass and [stop] mollycoddling the goddamn Nazis.” Eisenhower approved the film, and as the postwar occupation of Germany began in May, ordered it to be shown to all U.S. soldiers in the country.*

  That spring, Capra continued actively pursuing his separation from military service. Most of the projects that mattered to him were finished, or close to it. Know Your Enemy—Germany, which had gone through years of revisions, was finally completed but was virtually useless since Germany and the United States were no longer at war; in the coming months, it would be refashioned into an anti-German historical documentary called Here Is Germany. War Comes to America, the seventh and last film in the Why We Fight series, was also ready for release; Darryl Zanuck generously told Capra that it was “the greatest documentary film I have ever seen” and said he would be glad to distribute it theatrically through 20th Century Fox. But the promise never materialized into a firm offer, probably because Zanuck was enough of a businessman to know that as the war in the Pacific continued, the last thing moviegoers wanted to see in mid-1945 was a history lesson that ended, as War Comes to America did, with Pearl Harbor. Capra was still working on a pair of short propaganda documentaries, Two Down and One to Go! (which was intended for home-front moviegoers and featured cartoon images of Hitler and Mussolini being obliterated, with Tojo to follow) and On to Tokyo, a film for GIs in which General Marshall explained to a group of soldiers why troop numbers in the Pacific would have to be increased and why even exhausted veterans of the war in Europe would now have to fight against Japan. But once those two shorts and Know Your Enemy—Japan were completed, Capra told Lyman Munson, “I will consider myself through with my Army work. . . . I am just afraid that if I don’t return to my civilian occupation soon I will be so rusty, tired, and fagged out I’ll never make any more pictures.”