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The main box-office attraction in West Germany last week was a film that froze its packed audiences to stiff attention and sent them from the theater in silence with eyes averted. Compiled by a German-born Swedish intellectual named Erwin Leiser, it is a documentary that traces with graphic intensity the rise and collapse of the Third Reich. Its title: Mein Kampf.

At first, German audiences watch with embarrassed distaste, now snickering at the wild gesticulations of the early Hitler, now clearing throats in unison as Rudolf Hess shouts: "My Fu"hrer, you are Germany. When you judge, the people judge." The shock comes with 1942, as the film moves on to footage shot by SS cameramen in the Warsaw ghetto and found by Leiser in mislabeled cans in East German archives (the Red government let him buy the ten reels for $8 a meter).

Originally intended by the Nazis for "instruction purposes" but shelved for fear they might provoke sympathy for the Jews, the SS shots show German soldiers looking on with pleasure as Jews with swollen knees and fleshless legs drop to the ground and die. Children lie dying on filthy cots. Then, as heads in the audience lower, the camera pans along a trundling line of corpse-filled push carts to the edge of a lime pit, where the bodies are sent sprawling down a chute.

A Jewish emigrant to Sweden, 37-year-old Journalist-TV Producer Leiser made the film to answer "the questions of German young people" from whom, in his opinion, much has been veiled by the "unsatisfactory, evasive, shamefaced answers of parents and teachers." In eight weeks, nearly half a million people have seen Mein Kampf in West Germany. (It is also set for distribution in East Germany.) Audiences, in the main, consist of people under 40, and the popularity of the film tends to contradict the notion that West Germans are unwilling to concern themselves with the facts of the Hitler era.

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