Today, 70 years after the liberation of the camps, everyone remembers the terrible images that photographers have reported. Only the Soviet film operators, during the reconquest of lost ground (1942-1943), then the conquest of the Baltic countries, Poland and the eastern German territories (1944-1945) have been able to film on the sites of the most important massacres of civilians that Europe has experienced in its history. The filmic images of this crime, which the West has largely forgotten, have not been exploited since the end of World War II.
How and for what purposes were these images filmed, edited and projected in the USSR during the war? Why did the Soviets minimize the specificity of Jews among the victims of Nazi atrocities?
The hundreds of images shown in this exhibition reveal the opening of pits and traces of mass executions in Eastern Europe (Babi Yar, Kertch, etc.), the liberation of the camps, as well as the many trials and executions that followed the Liberation. This exhibition attempts to understand its uses, and seeks to grasp how the diffusion of some of them shaped the collective representation of the Second World War and the Shoah.
