Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II (16 page)

In one of the towers on the perimeter of the camp a crew of about seventeen SS men were also shot as they tried to surrender. Elsewhere in the camp between twenty-five and fifty more were killed by angry inmates, often with the help of American soldiers. Jack Hallett, one of the GIs who witnessed these killings, later remembered how gruesome these revenge killings could be:

Control was gone after the sights we saw, and the men were deliberately wounding guards that were available and then turned them over to the prisoners and allowing them to take their revenge on them. And in fact, you’ve seen the picture where one of the soldiers gave one of the inmates a bayonet and watched him behead the man. It was a pretty gory mess. A lot of the guards were shot in the legs so they couldn’t move and … and that’s about all I can say …
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Although a report on these incidents was commissioned, no American soldiers were ever brought to trial for breaking the Geneva Convention on the rights of prisoners of war.

The British too were beginning to discover the meaning of Hitler’s concentration camps. When they arrived at Bergen-Belsen on 15 April they were completely unprepared for the sights, stories and challenges that awaited them. After a fairly civilized surrender by the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, British officers were shown around by the commandant himself. However, what they witnessed within the camp was far from civilized: kapos leaping on prisoners to beat them with heavy sticks, inmates like ‘living skeletons with haggard yellowish faces’, the ‘stench of putrefying flesh’, and people defecating openly in the compounds and even on the floors inside their huts.
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Most disturbing, once again, was the sight of innumerable corpses, some lying singly where they had collapsed, others stacked in rooms, or heaped in piles around the compound. Derrick Sington, one of the first officers to enter the camp, claimed they looked ‘like the overladen counter of a butcher’s shop’: ‘Every trick that rigor mortis can play with the human countenance, every freakish posture that a sprawling human skeleton, thrown down at random, can assume, could be studied as one walked among those birch trees in the sunshine.’
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Over the coming days, one of the things that shocked the British most was the nonchalant way that the surviving prisoners lived their lives amongst the corpses, as if such sights were perfectly normal. One horrified medical officer described several such vignettes:

a woman too weak to stand propping herself against a pile of corpses, as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels; a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.
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There were so many dead bodies in various states of decay that it was impossible to estimate how many had died. According to Wilhelm Emmerich, the SS officer in charge of monitoring prisoner numbers, about 16,000 people died there in the two months before the British arrived, but other estimates go as high as 18,000 in the month of March alone.
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The small crematorium at Belsen had been unable to cope with the numbers, and a lack of fuel had prevented burning many bodies in open pits.

When the British questioned the inmates of this place they began to uncover some of the horror that they had experienced. Typhus and dysentery were raging through the camp. A diet of nothing but thin swede soup had reduced the prisoners to sticks. The hunger and deprivation here had become so bad that scores of people had resorted to cannibalism in an attempt to stay alive. One Czech prisoner, Jan Belunek, told British officers that he had witnessed corpses with their hearts cut out, and that he had seen another inmate‘sitting beside one of such corpses, and he was eating flesh that I have no doubt was human flesh’. This story was confirmed by two other inmates who worked in the infirmary, a doctor from Dresden called Fritz Leo and a Czech doctor called Zden
k Wiesner. Both reported the regular theft of corpses’ livers, which Dr Wiesner personally saw people eating. Dr Leo, who reported about three hundred cases of cannibalism in the camp, often saw people eating human flesh and even ‘boiled sexual organs’.
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The prisoners also reported countless cases of brutality, murder, medical experimentation and mass execution, both here and at other concentration camps throughout the Reich. An early report on Belsen, made on 27 April 1945, concluded that ‘the purpose of the camps was to destroy portions of the population’ before going on to reiterate that ‘what took place in the concentration camps was not intended to be mere incarceration, but was destruction immediate or delayed’. As for Belsen itself, although it was designated a
Krankenlager
(‘sick camp’), it ‘was not in any sense a hospital camp, as prisoners do not seem to have been intended to recover’.
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British soldiers did not take revenge on their German counterparts quite as violently as the Americans at Dachau, but the circumstances were very different. Unlike at Dachau the British did not enter Belsen keyed up for battle, but were expecting only medical, administrative and guard duties. Unlike at Dachau there was no hint of resistance from the Germans – indeed, they appeared to welcome the British, and their first contacts were fairly cordial. But as the true horror of the camp sank in, relations between the British soldiers and the concentration camp staff quickly deteriorated. The British put SS men to work burying the dead, forcing them to toil in the hot sunshine in full uniform. They were made to use their bare hands to carry the decomposing remains: anyone who tried to protect his hands with rags or pieces of clothing immediately received a jab from a rifle butt. Many of the camp inmates also came to watch them working, and would gather around the mass graves to shout insults at their former tormentors. ‘The one thing I saw that pleased me was the SS men being bullied into work,’ wrote one of the British medical staff on 22 April:

They collect dead and infected clothing – push their carts by hand and throw the mixed loads into enormous mass-graves (5,000 each). All the time our armed troops shout at them, kick them, threaten them, never letting them stop for a moment. What horrible types they were – these SS! - with their Hollywood criminal features. They are being shown no quarter - they know what end is in store for them when their work is finished.
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Another soldier, BSM Sanderson of 369 Battery, claimed that British vengeance occasionally became more extreme.

We gave the SS starvation rations, and put them to work without a break on the filthiest jobs. Our boys showed no squeamishness at all but struck them with rifle butts and jabbed them with bayonets to keep them working at the double. In one case an SS man was thrown half alive onto a mass grave, and it didn’t take long to smother him with corpses. He’d tried to escape, was fired at and wounded. So the men brought him back to a burial pit and treated him as he would have treated any internee.
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It is difficult to know, almost seventy years later, whether such an event actually happened or was merely wishful thinking on behalf of the British soldiers. I have been unable to find any confirmation of an SS man buried alive at Belsen, but the fact that such stories were circulating is no less significant. They served an important psychological function: British soldiers needed to feel that some of the very worst SS atrocities were now rebounding upon their perpetrators.

It was not only the camp guards who were treated harshly at Belsen, but all those who had worked at the camp, including the technicians and clerks who made up the majority of the SS men captured here. German civilians from Celle and other nearby towns were also forced to come to Belsen so that they could see for themselves what crimes had been committed in Germany’s name. According to one British sapper tasked with collecting the local town mayors, he and his fellow soldiers were not allowed into the camp because of the risk of typhus, but there was no such consideration for their German charges. When they returned, the Tommies showed them ‘the sharp end of our anger’ by deliberately dropping rifle butts on their feet in an attempt to break their toes. Many of these civilians appeared completely shocked by what they had seen. ‘Some were heaving up, some crying unashamedly, but a few just stared into space with an air of disbelief.’
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Just as the Russians had done at Majdanek, the British recognized the chance for making propaganda out of Belsen. Army cameramen were sent here almost immediately, and newspaper journalists and photographers were also invited. But what made a bigger impact was the arrival of British Movietone News on 23 April, eight days after the discovery of the camp. Soon images of the mass graves and mounds of bodies were being shown on cinema screens across Britain, and later in other countries as well.

The sight of this and other haunting films, which showed children playing on mounds of corpses, stick-thin wraiths unable to stand up, and bulldozers tumbling hundreds of bodies into mass graves, sealed the world’s view of Nazi Germany for ever. Here at last was visual evidence of German atrocities that could not be dismissed as mere propaganda. More importantly, it seemed at the time to implicate the entire German nation. In the words of Colonel Spottiswoode, the military government commander who gave a speech on camera to the German civilians visiting Belsen, the existence of camps like this was ‘such a disgrace to the German people that their name must be erased from the list of civilized nations’. It was not only the perpetrators of these crimes who should be punished, but the whole country: ‘You must expect to atone with toil and sweat for what your children have committed and for what you have failed to prevent.’
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The discovery of the concentration camps changed the moral landscape irrevocably. It seemed to vindicate everything that the Allies had done during the course of the war – the bombing of German cities, the insistence on unconditional surrender, the economic blockade that had brought famine to so much of Europe. It also provided justification for much that the Allies would do in the coming months. Henceforth, regardless of how much they would come to suffer, Germans would be unable to claim much sympathy: injustices against German soldiers and civilians would be ignored, as those at Dachau were, and as they were during the rape of eastern Germany by the Red Army. Occasionally, as we shall see, blind vengeance would even be encouraged by the authorities. As one historian has concluded, the violence and degradation that was uncovered in places such as Majdanek, Dachau and Belsen ‘had a way of implicating all, even the liberators’.
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The Revenge of Jewish Prisoners

If the soldiers who liberated the camps expressed a desire for vengeance against the Nazis, then so did the prisoners they rescued. ‘Sometimes’, Israel Gutman, a survivor of Majdanek, Auschwitz and Gunskirchen has written, the ‘desire and expectation of revenge’ were the ‘hope’ that kept camp inmates alive ‘during the final and most arduous stages of camp life’.
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Most historians tend to brush over the vengeance committed by concentration camp survivors for the same reasons that Allied soldiers at the time tended to turn a blind eye to it: such acts were barely a pinprick in comparison to what the prisoners themselves had experienced. They rightly point out that Jewish vengeance was insignificant compared to the havoc provoked by some other nationalities, as the American military governor, Lucius Clay himself, admitted in 1947: ‘[I]n spite of their natural hatred of the German people [Jewish DPs] have been remarkably restrained in avoiding incidents of a serious nature with the German population … their record for preserving law and order is to my mind one of the remarkable achievements which I have witnessed during my more than two years in Germany.’
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However, while it is true that only a very small percentage of Jews indulged themselves in this way, revenge was perhaps more widespread than is usually admitted. Most concentration camp survivors seem to have witnessed some form of vengeance, even if they themselves did not take part. The first targets were the camp guards themselves, and when they could not be found – because most guards tended to run away from the camps before the Allied soldiers arrived – then the inmates would turn on those amongst their own number who had acted as Nazi stooges, the kapos. If it was not possible to take revenge on those directly responsible for their own misery, the inmates’ frustrations were taken out on other Germans, particularly SS men, German soldiers or Nazi officials, but failing that any German at all.