The Liberation Of Bergen-Belsen
(Postwar memorial to Anne Frank and Margot Frank who both died in Bergen Belsen in 1945.)
When the British and Canadians
advanced on Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the German army negotiated a truce and
exclusion zone around the camp to prevent the spread of typhus. On April 11,
1945 Heinrich Himmler (the Reichsführer SS) agreed to have the camp handed over
without a fight. SS guards ordered prisoners to bury some of the dead. The next
day, Wehrmacht representatives approached the British and were brought to VIII
Corps. At around 1 a.m. on April 13, an agreement was signed, designating an
area of 48 square kilometers (19 square miles) around the camp as a neutral
zone. Most of the SS were allowed to leave. Only a small number of SS men and
women, including the camp commandant Kramer, remained to "uphold order
inside the camp". The outside was guarded by Hungarian and regular German
troops. Due to heavy fighting near Winsen and Walle, the British were unable to
reach Bergen-Belsen on April 14, as originally planned. The camp was liberated
on the afternoon of April 15, 1945. The
first two to reach the camp were a British Special Air Service officer,
Lieutenant John Randall, and his jeep driver, who were on a reconnaissance
mission and discovered the camp by chance. When British and Canadian troops
finally entered they found over 13,000 unburied bodies and (including the
satellite camps) around 60,000 inmates, most acutely sick and starving. The
prisoners had been without food or water for days before the Allied arrival,
partially due to allied bombing. Immediately before and after liberation,
prisoners were dying at around 500 per day, mostly from typhus. Initially lacking sufficient manpower, the
British allowed the Hungarians to remain in charge and only Commandant Kramer
was arrested. Subsequently, SS and Hungarian guards shot and killed some of the
starving prisoners who were trying to get their hands on food supplies from the
store houses. The British started to
provide emergency medical care, clothing and food. Immediately following the
liberation, revenge killings took place in the satellite camp the SS had
created in the area of the army barracks that later became Hohne-Camp. Around
15,000 prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora had been relocated there in early April.
These prisoners were in much better physical condition than most of the others.
Some of these men turned on those who had been their overseers at Mittelbau.
About 170 of these "Kapos" were killed on April 15, 1945. On April
20, four German fighter planes attacked the camp, damaging the water supply and
killing three British medical orderlies.
Over the next days the surviving prisoners were deloused and moved to a
nearby German Panzer army camp, which became the Bergen-Belsen DP (displaced
persons) camp. Over a period of four weeks, almost 29,000 of the survivors were
moved there. Before the handover, the SS had managed to destroy the camp's
administrative files, thereby eradicating most written evidence. The British forced the former SS camp
personnel to help bury the thousands of dead bodies in mass graves. Some civil servants from Celle and Landkreis
Celle were brought to Belsen and confronted with the crimes committed on their
doorstep. Military photographers and
cameramen of No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit documented the conditions in
the camp and the measures of the British Army to ameliorate them. Many of the
pictures they took and the films they made from April 15 to June 9, 1945 were
published or shown abroad. Today, the originals are in the Imperial War Museum.
These documents had a lasting impact on the international perception and memory
of Nazi concentration camps to this day. According to Habbo Knoch, head of the
institution that runs the memorial today: "Bergen-Belsen [...] became a
synonym world-wide for German crimes committed during the time of Nazi
rule." Bergen-Belsen Concentration
Camp was then burned to the ground by flamethrowing "Bren gun"
carriers and Churchill Crocodile tanks because of the typhus epidemic and louse
infestation. As the ConcentrationCcamp ceased to exist at this point, the name
Belsen after this time refers to events at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp.[ There
were massive efforts to help the survivors with food and medical treatment, led
by Brigadier Glyn Hughes, Deputy Director of Medical Services of 2nd Army, and
James Johnston, the Senior Medical Officer. Despite their efforts, about
another 9,000 died in April, and by the end of June 1945 another 4,000 had
died. (After liberation 13,994 people died.)
Two specialist teams were dispatched from Britain to deal with the
feeding problem. The first, led by A. P. Meiklejohn, included 96 medical
student volunteers from London teaching hospitals who were later credited with
significantly reducing the death rate amongst prisoners. A research team led by
Dr Janet Vaughan was dispatched by the Medical Research Council to test the
effectiveness of various feeding regimes.
The British troops and medical
staff tried these diets to feed the prisoners, in this order:
Bully beef from Army rations.
Most of the prisoners' digestive systems were in too weak a state from long-term
starvation to handle such food.
Skimmed milk. The result was a
bit better, but still far from acceptable.
Bengal Famine Mixture. This is a
rice-and-sugar-based mixture which had achieved good results after the Bengal
famine of 1943, but it proved less suitable to Europeans than to Bengalis
because of the differences in the food to which they were accustomed.[26]
Adding the common ingredient paprika to the mixture made it more palatable to
these people and recovery started.
Some were too weak to even consume
the Bengal Famine Mixture. Intravenous feeding was attempted but abandoned – SS
doctors had previously used injections to murder prisoners so some became
hysterical at the sight of the intravenous feeding equipment.
Aftermath:
Legal Prosecution: Many of the former SS staff who survived the
typhus epidemic were tried by the British at the Belsen trial. Over the period
in which Bergen-Belsen operated as a concentration camp, at least 480 people
had worked as guards or members of the commandant's staff, including around 45
women. From September 17 to November 17, 1945, 45 of those were tried by a
military tribunal in Lüneburg. They included former commandant Josef Kramer, 16
other SS male members, 16 female SS guards and 12 former kapos (one of whom became
ill during the trial). Among them were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Hertha
Ehlert, Ilse Lothe [de], Johanna Bormann and Fritz Klein. Many of the
defendants were not just charged with crimes committed at Belsen but also
earlier ones at Auschwitz. Their activities at other concentration camps such
as Mittelbau-Dora, Ravensbrück, Neuengamme, the Gross Rosen subcamps at Neusalz
and Langenleuba, and the Mittelbau-Dora subcamp at Gross Werther were not
subject of the trial. It was based on British military law and the charges were
thus limited to war crimes. Substantial media coverage of the trial provided
the German and international public with detailed information on the mass
killings at Belsen as well as on the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eleven
of the defendants were sentenced to death. They included Kramer, Volkenrath and
Klein. The executions by hanging took place on December 13, 1945 in
Hamelin.[28] Fourteen defendants were acquitted (one was excluded from the
trial due to illness). Of the remaining 19, one was sentenced to life in prison
but he was executed for another crime. Eighteen were sentenced to prison for
periods of one to 15 years; however, most of these sentences were subsequently
reduced significantly on appeals or pleas for clemency. By June 1955, the last
of those sentenced in the Belsen trial had been released. Nine other members of
the Belsen personnel were tried by later military tribunals in 1946 and 1948.
Denazification courts were
created by the Allies to try members of the SS and other Nazi organisations.
Between 1947 and 1949 these courts initiated proceedings against at least 46
former SS staff at Belsen. Around half of these were discontinued, mostly
because the defendants were considered to have been forced to join the SS.
Those who were sentenced received prison terms of between four and 36 months or
were fined. As the judges decided to count the time the defendants had spent in
Allied internment towards the sentence, the terms were considered to have
already been fully served. Only one trial was ever held by a German court for
crimes committed at Belsen, at Jena in 1949; the defendant was acquitted. More
than 200 other SS members who were at Belsen have been known by name but never
had to stand trial. No Wehrmacht soldier
was ever put on trial for crimes committed against the inmates of the POW camps
at Bergen-Belsen and in the region around it, despite the fact that the
International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg had found in 1946 that the
treatment of Soviet POWs by the Wehrmacht constituted a war crime.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.