‘Silent Night’ in Nagasaki: Christmas 1945

Reprinted with permission from Greg Mitchell’s newsletter Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.

Decades before I started work on my award-winning documentary “Atomic Cover-up” in 2020, I had heard of the alleged episode: Japanese survivors of the second U.S. atomic bomb gathering in the ruins of the Urakami Cathedral—the largest in the Far East—in Nagasaki at Christmas to celebrate Christmas with songs such as “Silent Night.” I never expected to find a record of it, but ultimately, I did secure it and used it for the haunting opening of my film.

You can now watch the short version of my film (27 minutes) for free everywhere at the PBS site or any PBS apps, or the full 52 minutes for free via Kanopy if you have any sort of library card. But you can just click below now and watch that 90-second “Silent Night” segment below in this clip. Narration by my friend, the great Dennis Predovic.

»»NOTE: The companion book for the film is on pre-holiday sale for just $1.99 in its ebook form, also titled “Atomic Cover-up,” updated this year with more than a dozen pages of material related to the release of “Oppenheimer.”

Greg Mitchell is the author of a dozen books, including “Hiroshima in America,” and the recent award-winning The Beginning or the End: How Hollywood – and America – Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, and has directed three documentary films since 2021, including two for PBS (plus award-winning “Atomic Cover-up”). He has written widely about the atomic bomb and atomic bombings, and their aftermath, for over forty years. He writes often at Oppenheimer: From Hiroshima to Hollywood.