The making of Kevin Brownlow’s film, It Happened Here, began eight years ago in 9.5mm, before they found a way to film it again in 16mm. […] The film has been accused both of fascism and a pacifism similar to a kind of moral nihilism. But the fascists who appeared en masse at the Odeon in Leicester Square, with the intention of applauding their favourite subject, were reduced to silence, even during the longest anti-semitic dia tribes. And the critics who saw in the massacres of the German prisoners by the British partisans rather ‘fascist-like’, seemed to have forgotten the meaning of a previous sentence: “The most dangerous thing about fascism is that it forces us to fight it with the same means”. Therefore, I would venture to say that the viewers’ main emotion is one of sadness and pain in understanding the partisans. In their inner souls, the British are obsessed not only by Puritanism’s masochism, but also the by fear that without the United States, Russia and Hitler’s own mistakes, the war would have been lost. […] From an intellectual point of view, the Nazi interpretation of history and British society, which tends to criticise any type of historical rhetoric, is extremely interesting. The presence of Nazi sentiments expressed in a very English voice is grotesquely appealing, and in the apparent spontaneity of an anti-semitic conference, it emulates the best cinéma vérité. The mixture of ‘trompe-l’œil’ documentary and historic nightmare produces an intense emotional charge, and might be a new beginning for fantasy film.

Raymond Durgnat, En Angleterre occupée, “Midi Minuit Fantastique”, n. 15-16, December 1966