Pod Insights Dan Snow's History Hit The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen About this episode Warning: This episode contains detailed discussion of the Holocaust and genocide, which some listeners may find upsetting.
80 years ago, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The horrors they witnessed would haunt them for the rest of their lives.
Bestselling author and journalist Thomas Harding joins us to revisit this harrowing day, describing the camp's unimaginable conditions and the fates of the people held there. He also provides some necessary reflection on the complexities of the British response.
Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.
You can hear more about the history of Auschwitz and the concentration camp system here - https://shows.acast.com/dansnowshistoryhit/episodes/a-history-of-auschwitz.
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2:07 Dan Snow? The British troops who arrived at the gate to the camp were totally unprepared for what they found. Tens of thousands of prisoners. They were emaciated. They were in desperate need of medical attention. They were at the edge of death. Typhus, dysentery, starvation, snapping at their heels. The barely living moved around among the corpses that lay on the ground, something like 13,000 unburied corpses. One member of the British forces recalled, "The bodies were a ghastly sight. Some were green. They looked like skeletons covered with skin. The flesh had all gone." There were bodies
2:51 Dan Snow? of small children among the grown-ups. In parts of the camp, there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled five or six feet high. A medic present wrote that "outside the huts were piles and piles of dead bodies, and living ones. They didn't know which were which. The dead and the living were all together." The British Army had just stumbled across the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. This is the next in our series of D-Day to Berlin, and it marks the 80th anniversary of that liberation
3:31 Dan Snow? on the 15th of April 1945. I'm glad to say I'm joined again by Thomas Harding. He's a bestselling author, journalist, and documentary maker. He came with me to Auschwitz earlier this year. And if you want to hear that episode, and how the Nazi concentration camp system worked, and indeed the death camp system, you can go back and listen to that episode, A History of Auschwitz, from late February of this year. But in the meantime, folks, we're going to talk all about Belsen and its liberation.
4:21 Dan Snow? Thomas, good to see you again, buddy.
4:23 Speaker 04 Great to see you as well, Dan. How are you doing?
4:25 Dan Snow? So, well, I'm doing very well. Take me back, take me back 80 years ago. It's spring now, what, late March, early April. I mean, what is the situation in Germany?
4:35 Speaker 04 We're talking spring 1945. We're very close to the end of the war. Everyone pretty much knows it's over in Europe and the American and British and other allied forces are moving east towards Berlin and they've arrived in Germany, they're in Germany and they just begin to come across some appalling atrocities as they make their way through the western part of Germany. And on the 15th of April, they come across what is for many the most appalling moment, day of their lives, when they arrive at this camp, which they really didn't know about.
5:18 Dan Snow? So that's interesting. So they're just another unit pushing through, liberating Germany, and suddenly thought they just arrive at a place?
5:26 Speaker 04 We're talking about the Belsen camp in western Germany. And three days earlier, there'd been a capitulation between the commandant who was running the camp and some British forces. There is some discussion about who was the first people to arrive in the camp. We can talk about that maybe, a little bit of controversy there. But it wasn't until the 15th. It took three days. I'm not sure why it took three days, but it took three days for the first British soldiers to arrive at Belsen. And we should also talk about the name Belsen. Is it Belsen? Is it Bergen Belsen? That's also a different conversation.
6:00 Dan Snow? But it's as far as this conversation, the British have been made aware, had they, that there was something wrong in the camp?
6:04 Speaker 04 So I don't think so. So again, a lot of people claim to be the first people into Belsen. I'm going to call it Belsen, if you don't mind. Some people call it Bergen Belsen. And there is some debate about how much the British knew. All the British accounts say they were shocked by what they discovered. I mean, all of them. There is some debate, though, especially amongst Jewish authors, historians of the Holocaust, that maybe the British knew more than they let on. And the reason why that is, is because there is a story that came out, I'm going to say about 10 years ago, and gradually more and more details have been revealed to the public.
6:46 Speaker 04 That the first person to arrive was actually a member of the SAS. And this person's job was to go and recover one of his comrades. His name was Jenkinson. This is the soldier who was actually in supposedly in Belsen. So there've been a couple of newspaper articles, one in the Daily Mail, another one in the Express, which have kind of dwelled on this fact that the first people into the camp were SAS. Which makes you ask the question is how, how did they know? How did they know that there was a British prisoner of war there? How did they know to go in? Now, did they know about the conditions? I don't think so. And all the testimony, all the memoirs, all the interviews indicate that none of the British soldiers,
7:27 Speaker 04 whether they were born in Britain or otherwise, had any expectation of the horrors that awaited them.
7:34 Dan Snow? So it's on the 15th of April, 1945, that the main body of the Brits arrive at the camp. What was happening there at that time that was so particularly disturbing?
7:50 Speaker 04 Well, I think we should probably talk about what their experience was. And we have a lot of firsthand testimony of what it was like to arrive at the camp. These were typically young men, mostly men. There were some nurses who were there as well. There were some journalists, female journalists and others who arrived. They arrived at the camp and from their testimony, it appears that there was no real signage. There didn't, you know, there was no kind of gate like in Auschwitz or in Dachau or in some of these other. It was basically in the middle of the woods, just outside of Chela. And you kind of went down this track and then you turned left, then you went through the woods. And you had to kind of know where you were going to find this place. And then there was a security gate.
8:35 Speaker 04 There are some accounts of a metal gate. I don't know if that's true. I think there might be some confusion because there were actually two camps. There was the camp where the Jewish prisoners were held. And then nearby, there was an old Panzer camp, a tank camp, which was also being used for overflow. So I think there's some people described there being a metal gate. I wonder if that's what they're talking about. But in this main camp, there was just a security gate and then barbed wire fence. And the gates are open. They've already made this agreement to hand over. The camp, the SS officers have to hand over to the British. They're waiting for the British. They arrive and I was just reading about it this morning, just to remind myself of some of the details.
9:18 Speaker 04 It is just so upsetting, even just eighty years later, reading about this stuff. I can't imagine what it was like being a young person arriving, because typically they were young, arriving at a camp. Their first impressions would have been thousands, I'm not exaggerating, thousands of corpses on the ground. I mean, just saying it is just appalling, isn't it? There would have been a few prisoners looking at them, where dressed up in whatever clothes they could manage to keep. Some of it would have been black and white striped pyjamas, but often it wouldn't be because by the time the British arrived, these people were in terrible, terrible condition. And so having clothes that resembled clothes would have been an achievement.
10:00 Speaker 04 There were some barracks, there would have been people watching from barracks. And then further into the camp, as they pushed into the camp, there would have been these mass graves. I mean, it would have been appalling. The experience would have been, and they say, by all accounts, by all the tests me, they say was as overwhelming and deeply, deeply disturbing for the people who just arrived. Unimaginable.
10:22 Dan Snow? It's unimaginable. And what was so distressing for the liberators, apart from anything else, is that they they couldn't really halt this ongoing catastrophe as quickly as they would have wanted.
10:32 Speaker 04 This is a controversy and maybe now eighty years later, we might be brave enough to talk about some of these things. So as you were beginning to say, fourteen thousand people died, prisoners died, Jewish people died after the British liberated the camp. That's an enormous number, fourteen thousand people. The estimates of how many people were in the camp, in the two camps, maybe between fifty and sixty thousand, the numbers vary. Maybe fifteen thousand in what I was calling the panda camp, and maybe forty five thousand, if you know the split between the two. And fourteen thousand people died. That's a large number of people to die. And what really has never been answered is why?
11:12 Speaker 04 I mean, why did so many people die? I mean, yeah, of course, they were in terrible condition, typhus was endemic, starvation, dehydration, there was almost no water, medicines. Most of these people had been in other concentration camps and had horrendous experiences. They just enjoyed a terrible winter. Some of the prisoners had somehow survived places like Auschwitz, come to Belsen, and not been able to survive. It was an appalling hellhole of a place. But why did so many people die after the British arrived? Why was there not more medical support? Why did the British not know more about how to feed these people? Because lots of mistakes were made, lots of mistakes
11:54 Speaker 04 were made. And inevitably, we can celebrate the fact, and we should celebrate the fact the British liberated, of course. It's an extraordinary achievement. What do you think? Do you think it's not appropriate to even ask those questions to say, why did so many people die?
12:08 Dan Snow? No, of course. Of course, go ask questions, absolutely.
12:11 Speaker 04 Yeah.
12:11 Dan Snow? Yeah. And everyone who was there that I've ever talked to or interviewed has asked those questions as well. And tragically, many of them have blamed themselves. So the liberation of Belsen, unlike Auschwitz, doesn't feel like a celebration in our national story.
12:28 Speaker 04 I mean, I think what's so remarkable about Belsen, unlike Auschwitz, so Auschwitz, which was liberated three months earlier, right, 27th of January, almost three months earlier, there was almost no news coverage. I mean, I was thinking about this today. Why do people not know about Auschwitz in London, Scotland, around the States, all around the world, until much later? It appears that the Russians just didn't want to let people know. And there was barely no news coverage of the liberation of Auschwitz and the conditions within. And it was only actually just before VE Day, our 8th of May, I think the day before, that the first kind of news reports came out, and they got buried in the armistice in the end
13:08 Speaker 04 of the war. So it was really later that the horrors of Auschwitz weren't really known. And so Belsen, particularly for the British Commonwealth, was the wake-up call, that this was the moment. And I spoke to this man who I used to work with, he was a, he was a very well-known screenwriter. His name was Ronnie Harwood. He wrote screenplays like The Pianist. I don't know if you remember that movie. And he says he remembers growing up in South Africa, being at the movies, and they'd have these newsreels before the main movie, these black and white newsreels. And he remembers being a very young boy, watching the newsreels of the... British, I think Pathé News filming the conditions of the camp, they're clearing up the camp, these images of the bulldozers pushing the corpses into the mass graves.
13:52 Speaker 04 And these awful pictures. And he remembers that transforming his life. He remembers that as a key moment in his life. And I think that was true for so many people, the images which came out of Belsen particularly, were a total shock to people. There had been rumours in the newspapers about gassings and about people's bodies being turned into soap and so on. But there was never a real sense of truth. Belsen, this is the moment, the pictures from Belsen is what really transformed the public consciousness of a generation, because it was so appalling.
14:26 Dan Snow? Let's go back to the start of the Belsen story. It was established in 1940, so not one of the earliest concentration camps. What was its job originally?
14:37 Speaker 04 Originally, it was for prisoners of war, Belgian and French prisoners of war. So in 1941, it became a camp for Soviet prisoners of war. And it was called Starleg 311, 20,000 men. And that's really how it remained until about 1943, when it kind of evolved, it morphed. And it became a number of things. Its history is complicated, like so many of these camps. It's very hard to say this happened, this happened. It morphed, but-
15:06 Dan Snow? But just interrupt those Soviet prisons of war, I mean, they were starved to death, effectively. I mean, there would have been vast, vast numbers that died there.
15:13 Speaker 04 Oh, absolutely. I mean, and the conditions were absolutely appalling and were a forerunner of what was to come. There was almost no food, water was hard to find, disease was rampant. And the treatment of Soviet prisoners of war is a scandal even to this day. And it really falls hard on the German guilt. One of the things that is very important in terms of the Germans' response, even today with Putin and Russia, is their sense of responsibility for the atrocities they committed towards the Russian soldiers in the Second World War. And this is a prime example. And then in 1943, the camp was transformed into its next iteration,
15:54 Speaker 04 which was an exchange camp, a place where the Nazis were siffling off Jews who they thought they could either swap for Germans who were being held in other countries, or they could sell for ransom effectively. And there were Jews from the Netherlands, Jews from Hungary, other places around Europe. By 1944, about 15,000 were there. The conditions were bad. They were really bad, nowhere near what would happen later on. And some of those Jews were swapped. They were exchanged. And many of them ended up in Palestine.
16:35 Dan Snow? You're listening to Dan Sinno's History. We're talking about the liberation of Belgium. More coming up.
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19:08 Dan Snow? And would they have been treated reasonably well because the Nazis wanted to use them as bargaining chips?
19:14 Speaker 04 So again, it's complicated. My understanding is there was multiple different camps. So for example, there was what they called a star camp where they had the kind of the most valuable, what they classed as the most valuable people. And they have these other camps which were deemed for the less valuable people. So I think it depended on where you were. I think if you're in the star camp, I think you're allowed to dress in your own clothes. You probably got better food and water. I think in the other camps, your conditions were pretty appalling. The mortality rates were high. There was a low chance that you were going to survive. Now, these weren't camps that there were gassings. This is not a place like Sobobor or Treblinka or Auschwitz.
19:53 Speaker 04 We're talking about neglect, intentional neglect, where there's no water, there's no food, there's no medicine or very limited. And people are living in incredibly difficult conditions, overcrowded. There's raw sewage running through the camp. I mean, it's really appalling. And that takes you really through to the back end of 1944. There was a visitor who came, I thought I might read you something, I thought we'd have a witness. This is the commandant of Auschwitz, who came to visit in nineteen forty-four, and his name was Rudolf Huss. And by that stage, he'd been reassigned to work in the inspectorate for concentration camps. And he came to see the place in nineteen forty-four, and this is what he said.
20:38 Speaker 04 And this is the man who ran Auschwitz, right? So he's got some perspective. "The camp was in a wretched state, the huts for the inmates, the buildings for the staff, and even the barracks for the guards were badly dilapidated. Sanitation was far worse than in Auschwitz, far worse than in Auschwitz. In spite of all that I had become accustomed to in Auschwitz." And by that stage, he had murdered over a million people. "In spite of all that I had become accustomed to in Auschwitz, even I must describe the conditions here as terrible." That was the autumn of nineteen forty-four, and things were only going to get worse.
21:11 Dan Snow? Why were things getting worse? Were people arriving from camps that had been overrun by the Red Army in the east?
21:18 Speaker 04 That's exactly what it was. This is exactly what it was. So you had camps for being liberated by the Russians. I mean, most famously Auschwitz, but other camps as well. And the prisoners, the people who had somehow survived those horrific years in Auschwitz, somehow, they were now forced marched through the brutal winter nineteen forty-four into forty-five. Frozen conditions, sometimes put onto trains, and many of them were taken to Belsen. So what had been, the camp is designed for seven thousand people. What then became fifteen thousand people grew and grew and grew, so that by the spring of nineteen forty-five, there was fifty to sixty thousand people.
22:02 Speaker 04 Among those were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who had been part of that death march and transportation of Auschwitz to Belsen. And so you can only imagine, Rudolf Huss described the conditions in the autumn of forty-four. Now imagine twice, three times, four times as many people, and we're in the spring of nineteen forty-five.
22:22 Dan Snow? And then Germany is essentially defeated and you can imagine, I mean, the logistics, I mean, who's sending any food shipments at all down there? I mean, it would have been just hell.
22:32 Speaker 04 Well, my great uncle arrived in early May. So I think, what was that, two weeks, three weeks after liberation? Within our family, we've got this first hand account. He was a war crimes investigator for the British Army and he was sent there to help with translations because he was born in Germany, he was a German Jew, and he was going to help with the investigations and the interrogations of the SS officers who had been put into custody in Belsen. Many of them had come from Auschwitz. And he describes what it was like in those first few days. And under-resourced is one thing, horrifically under-resourced. He actually had to help with the clearing up of the camp. He was there during the mass grave ceremonies. And then it was so bad, the typhus was so bad
23:17 Speaker 04 that they actually moved everyone out of the camp and they moved them to what I was talking about before about the Panzer camp. And then they torched, I don't know if you've seen them, these images of them having these flamethrowers and just burning everything. They burned all the barracks, they burned everything because the disease was just endemic. It was just impossible to keep them there.
23:37 Dan Snow? How did your great uncle and his colleagues go about sort of trying to establish who was to blame for this and bring people to justice?
23:44 Speaker 04 Well, you know, at first it was a bit chaotic. You know, there'd never been a war crimes trial in this kind of wartime situation. And the British and the Americans and the French and the Russians wanted to have justice. And they were working towards this major war crimes trial in Nuremberg, which would start later in the year. But the British wanted to have their own war trial for the people they captured in Belsen. And they focused on 45 people, including Joseph Kramer. So actually, the trial was called Joseph Kramer and 44 People, including about half women, half men, because they had the female officers who were running the women's camp. And so the task for my
24:28 Speaker 04 great uncle and his colleagues from the number one war crimes investigation team was to collect the testimony, that was the first job, from the SS officers. So you can imagine, he's 26 years old, he's born in Berlin, he fled the Nazis, he's Jewish, he joined the British Army. And now here he is, listening firsthand.
24:47 Speaker 04 To the people who were in Auschwitz. And we're talking about Joseph Kramer Ermergraser, who ran the women's camp in Auschwitz. You're talking about Elizabeth Volkanroth. You're talking about Dr. Klein, who was the doctor. And they talked about the transports arriving in Auschwitz. They talked about the selections between the men and the women. And then who's going to go into the gas chamber? Who's not going to go in the gas chamber? They talked about the gas chambers, the crematorium. I mean, can you imagine? He's hearing all this firsthand from the perpetrators who were there, who were right at the center of this, maybe the worst, atrocious year of human history. And he was hearing it from them. The Imperial War Museum actually has these testimonies. And you can see my great uncle's name at the bottom of it. Because, you know, he had to countersign because he was the interpreter.
25:32 Speaker 04 And when I first read these, Dan, I started crying because I just couldn't imagine what it was like for him to hear this firsthand. I mean, he was, he had this dual role. He's both this British soldier hearing it and he had a job to do. But he's also a German Jew. These were his people.
25:46 Dan Snow? Did anyone stand trial for the crimes of Belsen?
25:49 Speaker 04 Yeah, so 45 people stood trial, Joseph Kramer and 44 others. Joseph Kramer was the commandant. The trial started on the 17th of September, 1945. And it was in Luenberg Court, which is nearby. And it was run by the British, unlike Nuremberg, where they had multiple different countries involved. This was just a British show. And it was quite quick. They did have testimony from some of the victims. And they also had film footage, they showed some film footage, I think from Auschwitz, to show where people have come from, as well as footage from what had been witnessed of the corpses being cleared up in Belsen. And the prosecutor was pretty efficient with that many people.
26:34 Speaker 04 Their numbers around their necks, the different defendants, they sat in a dock. It was covered by the newsreels. So there's video footage of the trial. It wasn't covered nearly as extensively as the Nuremberg trial, but there is footage. And then on the 17th of November, they were found guilty. And then on the 13th of December, they were hung. So of the 45, 15 were found not guilty. 19 were given in prison sentences and 11 were hanged, including Joseph Kramer, the commandant of Belsen.
27:08 Dan Snow? What defence had he used?
27:10 Speaker 04 He said, you know, I was following orders. I mean, at first, when my great uncle interviewed him, he denied what happened in Auschwitz, because he was the head of the Birkenau camp, the really large Birkenau camp where the mass killing happened. Some people call it Auschwitz II, I suppose to the kind of the old part of Auschwitz, Auschwitz I. He was in charge of Auschwitz II, Birkenau. He denied knowing about the crematoria. And then when it came to Belsen, he said, look, it was the end of the war. We couldn't get resources. We couldn't get food. We couldn't get medicine. I asked. He said, I asked Berlin. I kept pleading them for help and they wouldn't give it. So he blamed other people. He blamed the British
27:53 Speaker 04 and the Americans for bombing. He blamed the bureaucrats for not sending their supplies. He never took responsibility for the shocking conditions in Belsen. And by the way, they were all very well fed. Thank you very much. There was plenty of food for the German soldiers, the SS officers. They weren't skeletonly thin like the prisoners they were looking after.
28:15 Dan Snow? On this, Anna Russell, let me throw back the question that you sort of brought up at the start. What is the latest thinking on the British response to Belsen? Were they almost overwhelmed by the scale of what lay before them?
28:27 Speaker 04 I think there's divided opinion on this. On the one hand, historians praise the British for their compassion, for their success. We're dealing with the SS officers and bringing them to justice. For the way that they got a grip with an overwhelming situation, creating this new camp, a displaced persons camp. So that's kind of on the one side. On the other side, there are definite families of survivors. There are historians who say the British really were ill-prepared. There was plenty of research, academic papers, policy papers on how to deal with a humanitarian crisis like this. There were other instances
29:11 Speaker 04 of mass famine, which the British had to have to deal with in the empire. And there just weren't enough doctors. There weren't enough medical orderlies. The food wasn't appropriate. I mean, even my great uncle said that he felt terrible because he was giving people food who couldn't handle it. They were giving them the wrong food. It was too rich. It was too much. That's one of the things he felt really guilty about, actually. Look, it wasn't his job, but you know, you know what it is. You see somebody who's starving, they're desperate for food, then you give them food. Sometimes that's not the best thing to give them, to give them any food. You have to be careful about what food and how much you give it to them and when you give it. And now, of course, we know much more about that. We've had decades now dealing with famines around the world and starvations and dealing with
29:54 Speaker 04 camps of one sort or another. So there are questions, you know, was it a cock up? Because it clearly, the death of 14,000 people after liberation is a large number. Was this a cock up? Was it just inexperience? Or was it, and this way it gets much more tricky, a lack of priorities? Was it that the policymakers, the decision makers, not the people on the ground, the decision makers didn't really care that much? I mean, it's a horrible thing to say, but there's a question there. Was their priority on finishing the war? Don't forget, the war was still in its last few days. Was that what it was? That Berlin wasn't going to be occupied for another couple of weeks. So the war was still being fought. Is this what went
30:37 Speaker 04 wrong? Was it a lack of priority? You know, it's very hard to know. We do have some accounts where, from soldiers, again, I hate to even mention these things, but there are some soldiers who are like, they didn't want to be there. It was appalling. They felt it was work that was uncomfortable, you know, dealing with these very malnourished, very traumatised people. And in their view, their job was to fight a war. So there was a bit of that. I think maybe there was some antisemitism because these prisoners were Jewish, almost all of them were Jewish. Maybe with some of that. Having said that, I mean, if you're asking me, what do I think the consensus is? I would say, most historians would say, look, the British tried. They tried their best, but they just weren't prepared properly and they didn't,
31:19 Speaker 04 they didn't have the resources, they didn't have the specialism, the expertise, and their approach was wrong. It took them a while. Look, after a few weeks, they sorted it out. They brought in a whole bunch of nurses and medical students from London and elsewhere, and they started bringing in the skills that they needed. After about three or four weeks, the mortality rates really, really came down. So that I would say by the end of May, it was much more stable.
31:44 Dan Snow? Well, thanks, Thomas. Thanks for coming on to talk about this anniversary, this next in our D-Day to Berlin series. I'm sorry we only get you on for the catastrophically depressing episodes, but thank you very much, dude, for coming on.
31:55 Speaker 04 Thanks, Dan.
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32:54 Dan Snow? Have you been enjoying my podcast and now want even more history? Sign up to History and watch the world's best history documentaries on subjects like How William Conquered England, what it was like to live in the Georgian era, and you can even hear the voice of Richard III. We've got hundreds of hours of original documentaries, plus new releases every week, and there's always something more to discover. Sign up to join us in historic locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.
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