What Kind of Nazi Was He?
Before the documentary Nuit et Brouillard (“Night and Fog”) was shown at the Cannes Film Festival in 1956, French authorities censored a still image that appears in the film. In the photo, an unnamed man stands at the far left side of the frame, keeping watch over a wooden building and a scattered crowd of people. A fake beam has been drawn just over his head, concealing … something.
In the uncensored version, released many decades later, we see that what has been blocked is a jaunty rounded cap. It’s called a kepi, and any French civilian would have recognized it as part of the uniform of the French police. The officer is guarding prisoners at Pithiviers, a transit camp 50 miles outside Paris where Jewish deportees were put on trains for concentration camps farther east. He’s not a Nazi guard or member of the SS, but there he is, aiding and abetting the Reich.
Night and Fog was one of the earliest works of its kind—a dogged, revelatory Holocaust film that showed Nazi atrocities in all their horror, down to the fingernail-scratch marks left on the ceilings of gas chambers. In exchange for covering up the kepi, preventing the French from seeing one of their own blithely supervising genocide, censors ruled that the documentary could keep its final scenes of dead bodies being pushed by bulldozers, like road rubble, into massive pits. Night and Fog’s director, Alain Resnais, considered the quid pro quo sufficient for his purposes.
[Read: What it feels like when fascism starts]
In the 1950s, would the French have been surprised by the notion that “ordinary” people had allowed or encouraged the extermination of the Jews? The war had ended only 10 years earlier; they had lived
