Overview

German citizens see the consequences of war crimes

May 17, 1945 Nammering

The Allies confronted the German people with the crimes committed in their name. In the West German town of Burgsteinfurt, the British army forced the 4000 inhabitants to watch the film Atrocities: The Evidence. It contained footage from the Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen concentration camps, taken after the liberation of the camps.

In other places, too, the Germans were made to watch similar films.

Out of anger at what the Allied soldiers had come across in concentration camps and other places, they forced the population to rebury dead concentration camp prisoners and victims of executions, or to walk past the thousands of bodies of dead prisoners to make them realise what the Nazi regime had done.