The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (59 page)

In the American zone of occupation in Germany, the

Jewish DPs were spread out in a dozen main camps and many smaller groupings. In the British zone, how- ever, most Jewish DPs congregated in one place: the DP camp that was built on the ruins of Bergen-Belsen. This concentration camp occupied a central place in the British popular mind. On April 15, Belsen was liberated by British soldiers of the 21st Army Group. Grotesque images of this sprawling camp complex, in which were imprisoned 60,000 people, saturated the British press in the months of April and May. At the moment of its liberation, the camp was in a state of indescribable filth and desolation. More than 10,000 bodies were strewn about the grounds. In the British vernacular about World War II, “Belsen” became the standard term to refer to the evils of the concentration camp system and the depravity of the men who had designed it.
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As the spring yielded to summer and fall, however, the reality of Belsen changed. The bodies were buried. The army evacuated the pestilential huts of the camp and burned them; on May 21, a solemn ceremony was held as the last hut was torched. A giant portrait of Hitler was placed atop the structure, and the flames soon ren- dered it into ashes. The camp inmates, most of whom were ill and emaciated, were transferred to other parts of the camp with more substantial barracks that had been used by the German soldiers and by the panzer

training facility nearby. By midsummer, the British forces had set up an efficient and well-supplied hos- pital to serve the camp, and named it after the deputy director of the medical service of the Second Army, Brigadier Llewelyn Glyn Hughes, who led the relief ef- fort in the camp just after its liberation. Belsen became a displaced persons camp, and the British authorities renamed it Camp Hohne, after a nearby village. But for its Jewish inhabitants—and Jews made up about two- thirds of the residents of this DP camp—it was always Belsen.

In the months following liberation, the Belsen DP camp became the site of an acute political struggle between Jews and the British authorities in occupied Germa- ny. For the British, relief work inside liberated Belsen possessed a certain nobility. Army officers and relief workers often conceived of Belsen as a stage on which a certain kind of British decency and justice was on display. As the British occupation forces described it, their mission at Belsen was to heal these victims of the Nazis so that they could return to their lives inside a liberated, and tolerant, Europe. In addition to feeding, clothing, and sheltering over ten thousand desperately needy Jews, the British initiated a vigorous war crimes trial of Belsen’s former commandant, Josef Kramer, and over forty guards who had turned the camp into

such a hellhole. In the British mind, Belsen was a case study of liberation and the restoration of order.

The Jews of Belsen saw the camp in a very different light. They devoted single-minded focus to an objective that Britain steadfastly opposed: their release from the blood-soaked soil of Europe and the pursuit of a new life in a Jewish state in Palestine. For these survivors, there could be no question of remaining in Europe, or indeed of returning to a now-lost prewar Jewish life. In this line of reasoning, Belsen served not as a place of healing and recovery so much as a staging point for the battle ahead—a battle directed principally against Britain. As part of this struggle, Jewish camp residents, often through intermediaries in London and New York, strategically deployed an image of an unfree Belsen—a place where illness and hunger still stalked Jews, where barbed wire confined Jewish freedom, where British guards had taken over the persecution once practiced by Germans. Leaders in the camps knew that such ex- plosive images could undermine the British defenses that still enclosed Palestine. Belsen, then, was no mere way station for the ill and the homeless; it was a tinder- box of competing hopes and aspirations, a dangerous mixture of anger, pride, and determination.

The conditions that the British soldiers encountered as

they entered Belsen on April 15 were carefully, meticu- lously documented by the British medical personnel who arrived in the camp in late April.
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An investigation carried out by Lieutenant- Colonel F. M. Lipscombe of the Royal Army Medical Corps reported that camp inmates had been subsisting since January on a daily diet of 300 grams of rye bread, watery soup, and a root vegetable called mangold wurzel, a cousin of the beet and normally used as cattle feed. As in all concentra- tion camps, “what each individual actually received depended mainly on his ability to obtain it”—that is, the weak and feeble went without. “ The great majority of the internees had received no food or water for some five days before the camp was uncovered.” The inmates suffered from scabies, dysentery, sepsis of sores and wounds, typhus, tuberculosis, and the debilitating ef- fects of prolonged malnourishment. The psychiatric scars were also visible. According to Lipscombe, “the loss of moral standards and sense of responsibility for the welfare of others was widespread,” and the nor- mal human “fear of death and cruelty was blunted by repeated exposure—this especially noticeable in chil- dren.”
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Military reports that account for the conditions inside Belsen adopted a somewhat callous, even contemptu- ous tone, reflecting the fact that the army found the

prisoners difficult, awkward, and repellent. Their very survival raised the suspicions of the officers, as is evi- dent from one summary report.

The internees were from every strata of society, of ev- ery race and nationality in Europe and in all stages of mental, moral and physical degeneration. From the highest type of intellectual and member of the Maquis [underground resistance] to the lowest habitual crimi- nals, homosexuals and murderers. Those who survived at the time of our arrival did so for one or more of three reasons: 1) recent arrival 2) the holding of some posi- tion on the staff of the camp under the Germans and

3) through being above the average unscrupulous cun- ning evaders of the rules. Then it is to be remembered that their sanitary habits had had to be perforce of the most animal…. It was very difficult to find internees with both the physical capacity and the moral fibre to perform even a light days work or undertake responsi- bility with any degree of reliability.
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A medical officer, after examining the worst of the pa- tients in the field hospital, painted an unspeakable pic- ture: All of the “seriously ill were incontinent of feces and their beds were continually soiled, as there were insufficient orderlies to change them and in any case many of them had no sheets but simply lay on covered

palliasses. Almost every patient when first seen had di- arrhea, although this varied from 2–3 loose stools a day to an almost continuous production of watery stools. In the latter, a movement of the bowels invariably followed after taking anything by mouth, so that the patient was afraid to eat or drink.” The bodies of the patients were grotesque: “ The eyes were sunken and the cheek bones jutted out. These extreme changes made all the patients look alike so that it became quite difficult to distinguish one from another. This difficulty was ac- centuated by the fact that all patients had had the bulk of their hair shaved off. The skin of their arms legs and anterior-abdominal wall was often very rough, dry and scaly. There were large bed sores on the buttocks and the lower part of the back. The ribs stuck out…. The average weight of 18 males who were strong enough to stand upright on scales was 44 kilos [97 pounds]. 11 fe- males averaged 35.3 kilos [78 pounds].”
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At the moment of liberation, according to one estimate, the death rate in the camp was running at about 300–400 people per day. The British medical teams took pride in reporting that by May 15—one month after the liberation of the camp—the death rate had fallen to 88 per day.
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The challenge of restoring order and basic hygiene to this appalling place proved difficult. The camp had no food, the meager water supply was contaminated—

bodies were floating in the concrete water tanks—the camp was littered with corpses, and there were no medical supplies. Of the 60,000 in the camp upon lib- eration, nearly 14,000 died within days. While some 17,000 able-bodied prisoners were repatriated quickly, after receiving a dose of DDT and perhaps a rudimen- tary bath, the British army still faced the task of pro- viding shelter and medical aid to some 29,000 camp inmates, half of whom were desperately ill. Although precise records were not kept, it appears that after fur- ther repatriation of inmates and various transfers both in and out of the camp, by June the camp contained about 18,000 people, 12,000 of whom were Polish, Hungarian, and Romanian Jews.
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The British army moved quickly. The Eighth Army de- livered a convoy of food and water within a day or so of the camp’s liberation. Just down the road from Belsen, the Germans had built a large panzer training school, complete with ninety concrete barracks, recreation and medical facilities, and well-stocked supply de- pots. As the British soldiers began to transfer Belsen inmates there, they found in the storerooms tons of canned foods and supplies, locked away, untouched. These were gradually distributed, though many pris- oners could not yet eat solid food. A bakery and a dairy nearby were mobilized on behalf of the camp—actions

the Germans had notably failed to undertake—and the requisitioning of food from the nearby villages also commenced. Within two days of the camp’s liberation, a British medical unit arrived on the scene; by April 18, typhus patients were transferred to an improvised quarantine area among the former German military barracks. The full-scale evacuation of the camp to the panzer school and other nearby barracks began on April 24. This was a massive project, as the chief nurse in the camp, Muriel Knox Doherty, described in her letters home during this period. All inmates, she wrote, “were taken to a large building, all their cloth- ing removed and burned and their bodies cleansed of the gross filth and deloused. A colossal undertaking, dusting some 30–40,000 people with DDT powder!” A cleansing station—termed the “human laundry”—was set up to wash patients. Here, “British Tommies super- vised German nurses and attendants, who were obliged to cleanse, wash and dust these poor naked and ill creatures, cut their hair and wrap them in three fresh blankets.”
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Within a matter of weeks, the former rec- reational facilities of the German soldiers were trans- formed into a makeshift hospital sufficient for 14,000 patients—and this at a time when the war had not yet terminated, and supplies were short across Germany and Europe.

Conditions in the new camp remained awful, howev- er. As Doherty recalled, there were not nearly enough doctors or supplies to handle such a flood of patients; many died, or lay in stinking cots amid patients with ty- phus and dysentery. Even in the new medical facilities, “nursing conditions were primitive and over-crowded. There were insufficient bed-pans, practically no spu- tum mugs, and drugs were in hopelessly short supply

in the early days.…Thousands of patients were in the advanced stages of tuberculosis and it was impossible at first to separate them from the typhus cases; others were still dehydrated and exhausted.” Among the beds that crammed every room and lined every corridor, “an army of flies had taken possession; they were every- where in millions, thriving on the food hoarded by the prisoners. They occupied the wards and swarmed over everything. There were no mosquito nets and the weak were unable to protect their faces.”
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In all, it took almost a month to empty Belsen and trans- fer the former prisoners to better facilities in the pan- zer school barracks, and in the meantime, many pris- oners remained in Belsen amidst the filth in which the Germans had imprisoned them. Yet the British soldiers and doctors and nurses worked tirelessly in wretched conditions to save lives. They did so, by the thousands. And the survivors of Belsen knew that what had been accomplished there was worth protecting. In late May, the British authorities tried to transfer a thousand Pol- ish Jews to another DP camp located in a former SS camp at Lingen, near the Dutch border. As the Jewish chaplain Leslie Hardman told it, “they were taken in army trucks, traveled over bad roads, and arrived at Lingen after dark…. On arrival they did not want to leave the trucks, and implored to be taken back. The

authorities had not sufficient notice of their coming and, although a meal was hastily prepared, it was dif- ficult to distribute the food. People stumbled about in the darkness and there was great confusion. The chap- lain who went with them reported that everything was below the standard of life already reached in liberated Belsen. The accommodation consisted of wooden huts, many rooms of which were unfit for habitation, since there were holes in the sides and roofs; there was no electricity, and the sanitation arrangements were inad- equate.” A Quaker relief worker in Lingen confirmed that the camp lacked “paper, pencils, furniture, bed- ding, clothing,” and faced “gross overcrowding.” New- comers, including the 1,117 Jews from Belsen, were ex- pected to provide their own utensils and bedding. The Reverend I. Richards reported to the Jewish Chronicle that the transport to Lingen of Belsen Jews was a fias- co, and that “everything is so far below the standard of the past few weeks at Belsen that many did not wish to leave the trucks and implored to be sent back.” Within a few days, many of these survivors began to flee Lin- gen on their own, gradually making their way back to the camp at Belsen. Here is a vivid example of the para- doxical world of 1945: in late May, Jews seeking safety, security, and a minimal standard of living and medical care wished to get into the camp at Bergen-Belsen.
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