In the French part of the mine fires break out, which they try to contain by building brick walls, with the bricklayers wearing breathing apparatus.

She and her boyfriend, Emile, a miner, leave, and she expresses her distress over the stories about fires and explosions in the mine.

The fire gets out of control, igniting gas and causing roof collapses that traps many French miners.

As the German rescue team leave in two lorries, its leader explains to his wife that the French are men with women and children and he would hope that they would come to his aid in similar circumstances.

Although the scenes which take place inside the mine look extremely real, they were, in fact, sets designed by Erno Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht, who were meticulous about their authenticity and detail.

While calling the narrative over-sentimental, Curran wrote, "Pabst's plea for a peaceful future is both noble and honest, his direction of the heartbreak and devastation [is] enhanced by the brilliant cinematography by Fritz Arno Wagner and Robert Baberske, and the frighteningly real set design by Erno Metzner and Karl Vollbrecht.

"[4] When the film was released in the United States in 1932, Mordaunt Hall, film critic for The New York Times, praised the realism and the screenplay, writing "[Kameradschaft is] one of the finest examples of realism that has come to the screen ... [the] scenes in the mine are so real that one never thinks of them as being staged ... [and] [t]hroughout the length of this tale of horror one feels as though one were permitted through some uncanny force to look into all parts of the mine ...All the noises and sounds are wonderfully natural.

"[6] In a retrospective review, American film critic Pauline Kael commented, "In the early 30s it was still possible for large audiences to believe in the symbolic revolutionary meaning of smashing through artificial frontiers for the sake of natural brotherhood.