This Soviet film about Auschwitz uses footage shot during the first months after liberation (some scenes are staged). In addition to the horrors of the camp, the film also shows how the liberators understood Auschwitz in 1945. The film gives a graphic account of prisoners suffering from starvation, disease and SS violence. But there are also omissions and inaccuracies. The Holocaust hardly features, for example, as the role of Auschwitz in the systematic extermination of European Jews was not yet fully understood. And the figure of 4 million dead, often quoted in the first years after the war, was greatly inflated; historians now estimate that around 1.1 million prisoners died in Auschwitz.
Source: Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive