How did The Diary of Anne Frank allow George Stevens to address the horrors of war?

Director George Stevens utilized the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank as a medium to address the horrors of war, an experience he understood firsthand from his service in the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II.21

During his military service, Stevens was among the first to film the atrocities committed in the Dachau concentration camp at the time of its liberation. This profound encounter with the reality of the Holocaust fundamentally altered his perspective on filmmaking; while his earlier works were often optimistic, his later projects were characterized by a belief that tragedy is implicit in all human life.21

In The Diary of Anne Frank, Stevens leveraged a claustrophobic setting to depict the tension and despair of those in hiding, marking his first onscreen attempt to process the specific horrors of the war he had witnessed.3