WWII Deportation Kamp Westerbork in early in color

Westerbork was the infamous labour camp in The Netherlands during World War II which in fact was an in between station for Jews to be transported to the concentration camps in Germany and Poland. This film was made at the initiative of camp commander Alfred Konrad Gemmeker by the Jewish photographer Rudolf Breslauer. The latter did not survive the concentration camps. It shows moving scenes of Jewish labourers at work in the camp and boarding the trains that would take most of them to their destination of death. To this day the role of commander Gemmeker is controversial in view of the fact that until his death in 1982 he claimed to have had no knowledge of what happened in the concentration camps. Taking this into account, he received a prison sentence of only 10 years. The most poignent moment in this film is the footage of Settela Steinbach, a Roma girl who was part of a gypsy group, about to be deported. This scene of her face between the almost closed doors of a goods wagon is famous the world-over, but now can be seen for the first time in color. Historians only recently discovered her identity. This is just a summary of the total of 70 minutes of footage that was found after the war. The last scene of the German soldier standing guard was only recently discovered. The original fragments have been motion-stabilized, speed-corrected, enhanced and artificially colorized by means of modern A.I. software. Note the "double vision" blur that starts around 00:15 was caused by the initial use of a poor quality camera. Later on Gemmeker arranged a better camera. The full, much longer, nearly 2 hours long film about Westerbork that has been restored and colorized by me will also be uploaded soon to Archive.org Music: Philip Ayers - "Together We Rise". Source: Beeld en Geluid.

Director

Ricks Film Restoration