The film made by Soviet operators at Auschwitz following the discovery of the camp by the 1st Ukrainian front plays a central role in the construction of memory and representations of the site.
Many of the scenes extracted from it have survived to the present day, and regularly feature in documentaries devoted to the subject in its broadest sense, far beyond Auschwitz alone: the concentration camp universe, Nazism and the Second World War. To name but a few of the best-known, there are images of the vastness of Birkenau taken from the air, of a group of children in striped prisoner (Häftling) uniforms walking through a barbed-wire corridor, of tattooed forearms, and of women crammed into a barrack.
