German soldiers react to footage of concentration camps, 1945

The image shows the faces of German POWs, captured by Americans, watching a film about a concentration camp. This forced confrontation brought Germans face-to-face with the worst works of the Third Reich. It must be really hard to go through what they did and look back knowing that everything that happened to them, all of their friends who were killed or maimed was in the name of something horrific, something totally repugnant to their own values.

The caption reads: “German prisoners of war in American camps watch the documentary/presentation about German concentration camps.” (Image held by United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.)