As soon as Austrian producers Jono and Benji Bergmann read about the now-infamous PO Box 1142 camp, information about which was classified for over five decades, they knew they had to make a film about it.
During the Second World War, top Nazi scientists captured by the Allies were transported to the camp for incarceration and interrogation. But PO Box 1142 wasn’t located within the European theatre of conflict, such as Great Britain or close to the Russian Front. Rather it was to be found in Fairfax County, North Virginia.
What’s more, the personnel that were mandated to stand guard over and interrogate the Germans weren’t regular US military, rather German-speaking Jewish refugees, some of whom had survived the Holocaust, and all of whom had close family members who had been transported to the Nazi concentration camps in Europe. These include Camp Confidential’s key witnesses to, and participants within, operations at PO Box 1142; academic Arno Mayer and former lawyer Peter Weiss, now both in their mid-nineties.
As Producer Jono stresses, “this almost Kafkaesque camp [was] really like a psychological laboratory.”
What is soon apparent to everybody is that these top-level Germans are no ordinary POWs, and their treatment within PO Box 1142 becomes so lenient that it begins to border on the kindly, even to the point of allowing them day release to visit a department store (a Jewish-owned department store) to buy lingerie for their wives back in Germany, where war continues to rage.
And what becomes abundantly clear is that many of the scientists are being ear-marked for a post-War reality shaped by the inevitable US/Soviet realignment of political enmities, and that the expertise of a Nazi such as Wernher von Braun, who headed up the development of deadly German rocket technology (including the V2s that devastated parts of London), will be deployed in winning the eventual race to put a man on the Moon.
But at the heart of the film are the testimonies of Peter and Arno who played their own part in the story. They were men who despised their German charges, yet who were, not surprisingly, still treated with the same levels of derision and contempt by them. As directors Daniel Sivan and Mor Loushy say in a joint statement: “They know the price America paid for the moon landing was welcoming war criminals into its ranks. More than a thousand war criminals who were never tried for their participation in the Holocaust, are instead celebrated as American heroes.”
Such as the afore-mentioned Von Braun, who later became a friend both of JFK and Walt Disney, and whom we see carried on the shoulders of admirers after a successful US space mission. “It’s very clear what he knew,” says Jono. “The V2 rockets that bombed London and Antwerp were built through concentration camp inmates in Nordhausen-Dora. He would’ve known this. He would’ve been there. He would have known that the workers there, the slowest workers at this camp, would be shot as an example for how to build these rockets.”
After the declassification of information pertaining to PO Box 1142, The National Park Service conducted a series of audio debriefs, some of which are used in the film in addition to Peter and Arno’s testimonies. But there was no archival footage of the camp as the whole place was bulldozed, and everything within either burned, shredded or classified.
Hence the choice of animation to tell the story. “It was a decision that we made together with the directors,” explains Benji. “The only things we had were a couple of pictures and basically the descriptions in the audio debriefs…Through animation, we were able to really bring that camp to life. Also, secondly, I think much of it [the decision to use animation] is based on…this elusive quality of memory.”
Jono agrees. “Even the audio debriefs are from the perspective of 80-year-olds, and the interviews we conducted with Peter and Arno – they were 94 and 95…so animation allowed us an artistic way to embody those memories.”
The producer further stresses the benefits of making the project with a global streamer such as Netflix. “They were a very supportive partner, both creatively and allowing us to tell the story how we wanted to,” he says. “It’s quite special that a story like this gets such a global audience through a platform like Netflix. It’s very rare still to have survivors of the Holocaust, veterans of World War II telling their first-hand accounts.”
“Benji and I are grandchildren of Holocaust survivors,” he underlines. “We never really got to speak to our grandparents about their experiences. We know about their experiences [through our] parents. So for us personally, to have the experiences of talking to somebody like Peter Weiss, who grew up five minutes from where we grew up in Vienna, but during a very different time, and having him be able to tell a story in a way that’s all over the world – we have friends in Italy, in Istanbul, in Bolivia that are contacting us that they saw the film – it’s quite special, I think, for him, and especially for us.”
