AWFUL CONDITIONS IN POLITICAL CAMP

Auckland Star, Volume LXXVI, Issue 92, 19 April 1945, Page 6

AWFUL CONDITIONS IN POLITICAL CAMP

STARVING INMATES British Have To Guard Food With Tanks N.Z. Press Association—Copyright Rec. 2.30 p.m. LONDON, April 18. Information of revolting conditions at Belsen, political prisoners , camp, near Bremen, was given to the senior medical officer of General Dempsey's British Second Army by doctors in the prison camp. During 48 hours spent in the camp the British medical officer saw a pile from 60 to 80 yards long, 30 yards wide and four feet high of unclothed bodies of women within sight of several hundred children. Gutters were filled with rotting dead, and men who had come there to die were using, kerbstones as backrests. There was bunk accommodation for only 474 women out of a total 1700 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases. More than. 18,000 women who should have been in hospital were lying on bare bugridden boards. There were bunks for only 1900 men out of a total of 2250 acute cases. Seven thousand men should have been in hospital. The medical officer said he drove around the camp with the German commandant — a typical German brute, a cruel, sadistic, heavyfeatured Nazi. He was quite unashamed. There was no water for 28,000 women, 11,000 men and 500 children in the camp. The compounds were filled with dead and dying typhus cases. One compound was unsegregated. When the British forces brought food in to the camp they had to guard it with tanks and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners who were trying to get at the stores. The prisoners included four Britons and an unsorted mass of Germans, French, Belgians, Russians, Poles and Czechs. The doctor said that thousands of captured German soldiers had been paraded through the camp to see the conditions and the victims. Help Sent to Buchenwald Substantial help has been sent to the 21,000 inmates of the Buchenwald concentration camp since the Americans overran the camp, says The Times correspondent, but men are still dying at the rate of 40 a day because they are beyond help. Among the inmates until April 4 were the former Socialist Prime Minister of France, M. Leon Blum, and his wife; the French Prime Minister at the outbreak of war, M. Daladier; the French Commander-in-Chief at the beginning of the war, General Gamelin; the former Chancellor of Austria, Dr. Kurt Schuschnigg; Field-Marshal Milch, formerly a German commander on the Russian front; and Fritz Thyssen, the famous German industrialist. The King of Italy's daughter, Princess Mafalda. who was wounded in an Allied raid on the camp factory, died because of gangrene after an operation.