Prison camp’s fate: British to take charge
From David Woodward, Manchester Guardian war correspondent
14 April 1945
On the Aller
As a result of negotiations carried out between British and German officers during a local truce on this sector British troops will take over from the SS and the Wehrmacht the task of guarding a vast concentration camp at Belsen, a few miles north-west of Celle, which contains approximately 60,000 prisoners, both criminals and anti-Nazis.
This extraordinary step has been agreed upon by the British because typhus is rampant in the camp. Accordingly it is vitally necessary that the prisoners should not be allowed out until their infection has been checked, and in addition it will be necessary for Allied security officers attached to the military government to sort out which of the prisoners are in the camp, or rather the camps, for there are two of them, for political reasons and which are serving sentences for crime.
Final agreement was reached after negotiations whereby the advancing British agree to refrain from bombing or shelling the area in which the camp is situated and the Germans agree to leave behind an armed guard for a period of a week after the British have arrived, the German soldiers afterwards to be allowed to return to the German lines.
Outposts approached
The story of the negotiations is a curious one. Between eight and nine yesterday morning two German officers presented themselves before our outposts. They were taken back through our positions blindfolded until they reached a headquarters. By this time they had outlined their mission. They said that there were 9,000 sick in the camp, where all sanitation had failed completely since the power had been cut off. They suggested that the British occupy the camp at once, claiming that the responsibility for the camp was international in the interests of health.
After brief consideration the British senior officer rejected the German proposals and said it was necessary that the British should occupy an area of 10 kilometres round the camp as they wanted to be sure of being able to keep their troops and lines of communication away from the danger of disease presented by the camp.
British soldiers liberate Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945
With the British 2nd army, 18 April
General Dempsey’s senior medical officer said today that the Belsen prison camp near Bremen, with its thousands of typhus, typhoid, and tuberculosis cases, was “the most horrible, frightful place” he had ever seen. Here are some of the things he saw:
There was a pile – between 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide, and four feet high – of the unclothed bodies of women all within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead and men had come to the gutters to die, using the kerbstones as back-rests.
“The prison doctors tell me that cannibalism is going on,” the medical officer said. “There was no flesh on the bodies; the liver, kidneys, and heart were knifed out. There were five to seven births daily, but there was no water.”
There was bunk accommodation for only 474 women out of 1704 sickness cases. Another 18,600 women who should have been in hospital were lying on bare, bug-ridden boards. In the men’s quarters there were 1,900 bunks for 2,242 acute cases with another 7,000 cases who should have been in hospital.
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Belsen surprises burgomasters
By David Woodward
25 April 1945
Six burgomasters from small towns and villages in the neighbourhood of this most terrible of all Hitler’s camps were shown round the place today by officers of a British anti-aircraft regiment which is at present trying to sort out this dreadful place.
I reached the camp a few minutes after they had gone and was told that they had shown the greatest surprise and horror at the scenes which were produced by the regime with which they as state officials had been closely linked.
A farmer living opposite the camp with whom I spoke told me that nobody outside the camp had any idea of what went on there, though they had a pretty good idea that a display of curiosity would result in their going into the camp to stay.
Meanwhile in the camp the death-rate has been got down to 300 a day. Wehrmacht prisoners have been busy digging a fourth grave, designed, like the first three, to hold 5,000 corpses, and stacks of unburied dead have been disposed of, though occasional corpses are still being discovered about the camp grounds or in the filthy, dark huts where men and women are in same cases lying two or three in a bed.
However, those sick with any hope of survival are being evacuated to the emergency hospital set up in the huge army barracks nearby at the rate of 500 daily, and army tents are being erected by the score in the camp grounds to ease the overcrowding in huts.
The strongest gravediggers are some SS guards of the camp, but others have completely lost their nerve and are incapable of any sort of human activity. Amongst them I saw the prison doctor, who keeps on sending out messages to the British commandant. Prisoners state that he used to dispose of his patients by injecting paraffin into their veins but there is no proof of this yet available.
Belsen camp burned
2 May 1945
The last traces of the notorious Belsen camp were burned yesterday in a ceremony attended by former prisoners, says Brussels radio. In its place a monument is to be raised. Earlier a dispatch from a correspondent at SHAEF said that the camp’s death rate had been reduced by 80 per cent in a month. Forty thousand inmates were disinfected within 15 days of the liberation, and hospital accommodation for 17,000 patients was organised.
British survivor’s account of life in Belsen
Our special correspondent
21 September 1945
Luneburg, 20 September
This has been a terrible day at the Belsen trial. First this morning all the courtroom, court, prisoners, press, and German spectators saw the films taken in camp by the British army Film Photographic Unit just after British troops had liberated it. Then followed the evidence by the only Briton known to survive the camp – a Jersey schoolmaster named Harold Osmand le Drieullenac of St Helier.
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