When they liberated the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, horrified British soldiers buried the dead and tried to save the living. They also required that the German adults who lived near the camp come into the camp to see what had happened there. And they filmed what they saw. That film was made into a newsreel and distributed to cinemas in western Europe.

The documentary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen showed at a movie theater in a small town in eastern France about 75 years ago this week. By June 1945 the French were beginning to understand the depth of mistreatment that prisoners and slave laborers had endured in Nazi Germany. Huge crowds gathered at train stations whenever a train with deportees returning home was expected to arrive. The crowds could see how skeletal and weak those returnees were. Rumors spread as the family of returned prisoners talked about how sick their loved ones were. The crowds could also see that many of the people they expected to return home were not returning home.

One night that the documentary showed at the movie theater, the crowd poured out onto the sidewalk at the same time that some American soldiers were marching a column of German POWs down the street. Emotionally devastated by the horrors they had just witnessed on the screen and worried for friends and relations who had not yet returned home from the Third Reich, the crowd fell on the German soldiers. No one recorded what the American escort thought of this sudden mob attack, but they finally ended up firing into the air to restore order. They separated the angry civilians from the POWs and marched the Germans to their destination. No civilians were charged in the attacks.

It’s almost inconceivable that any French or Allied authority would have punished civilians for attacking German soldiers in those circumstances. Emotions around what the French call Le Retour (The Return – meaning the return of prisoners and laborers from Germany in 1945) ran very high in the summer of 1945. The authorities were likely to be just as sickened by the revelations of Nazi treatment of non-Germans as everyone else. Even if an individual was a stickler for law and order, it was very obvious that public opinion had every sympathy for the grieving and stricken, and none whatsoever for the enemy soldiers who represented the nation that had committed the crimes against humanity.

That particular incident happened in France, but the documentary made a deep impact throughout western Europe. Decades after the war, a woman told me that she vividly remembered seeing it in London in 1945.