BELSEN

Manawatu Standard, Volume LXV, Issue 136, 10 May 1945, Page 8

BELSEN

GERMAN PEOPLE INDICTED

(13y James Lansdalc Hoclson.)

GERMANY, April 29

You approach Belsen Camp through heavily timbered, country, i'inc woods stretching for miles give the area a sombre look. Suddenly you see a notice board on a tree trunk, "Hanger Typhus", with a white Haft' hanging alongside. The camp entrance was as busy as a barracks gate can be with British sentries and military police cai's driving up. There is nothing; much at first-to suggest horror. You are dusted with O.D.T. powder—squirted' from aii enormous syringe down your shirt, trousers, back and over your hair. We took our turn in -a group of soldiers who were joking and pulling faces over it. 'I he first officer we talked to was a ta'll, burly inlantrynian, a solicitor who is carrying out the investigation. He said he thought he had proof of about 16,000 murders against Joseph Kramer, the prison commandant (now iu custody elsewhere). Kramer, he said, was formerly commandant at Auschwitz Camp in Poland. 1 asked if he thought it true that cannibalism had occurred <at Eclsen. He said: Yes, there was plenty of evidence that it had. The liver, heart, and other pieces of the anatomy had been sometimes eaten—not much else was left. He it had occurred often- enough to be called "A Practice".

DEATH BY STARVATION

In his view these concentration camps were used for extermination—at Belsen it was extermination by starvation. People often went from one '■ camp to another —Belsen was the last on the list. -At Delsen your time had I come. One difficulty in obtaining know--1 ledge of B(. J lsen was that when people had been there longer than three months they were almost incapable of answering any questions, f asked what the rations were under the Germans. IHe said they were 108 grammes of bread and two pints, of turnip soup per day for each prisoner, in the medical ward the same plus a little Homer semolina—'2oo litres of that for 1200 people sulfering from typhus. i I may add to that, that enormous I numbers got so ill with dysentery and i typhus or both that going for their i iood became impossible. The ration was a slow or quick starvation diet, if you could not get it you died sooner, that was all. He showed me a cartoon a prisoner has drawn called "Give us this day our daily bread". It shows as much bread as would cover half your palm. He said those who have survived are often of a high type. There is a woman who recently came from Bremen Camp. When he asked her her hut number at Belsen she said, "Now let me think —l've got a new flat today." Her (fat is a bunk, one of 1000 bunks in a hut where the British would normally place perhaps 50 people. This woman, able to'joke, has been in captivity for four years, but only a few weeks at Belsen. V Jewess, looking at the cringing S.S. ,uards fearful of the fate awaiting .hem, said, "Look at them after.nine i days! And we've had four years of it." When I inquired if there were any antiseptic, the investigation officer purled out a bottle of enu de cologne and saturated my handkerchief. We called at the office of the burial officer, a young English major of the artillery, in the past six-days we have buried the following num.fcU's: 680, 400, 1250, 1700, 1200 and 680. We have thus caught up with the unburied dead which were littering the camp. Prisoners are still dying at the rate of about 300 per day. In the 10 graves in the camp 20,000 are buried. GREEN WITH MOULD. Some 300 British artillerymen have been and are working here. When I have sympathised with the burial officer he said, "It is probably the best job we have done in the war. We are glad to do it." He was formerly in the textile trade at Halifax, Yorkshire. He said, "If you work among the dead you can get on with it. if you were only a sightseer it would get you down. Some bodies were green with mould. We gave the troops some rum to help them to do the job." A third officer said, "'the worst thing is to see how they have been starved, i could carry a dozen of the bodies, I do believe." Near the burial office is a blackboard painted along the top with the offences for which the prisoners were here, and down the side with the 25 various nationalities who were interned. The offences included—homosexuals, evangelists, intellectuals, Red Spaniards, aiieu criminals, Jews (just the word Jew—nothing else),' unsocials, saboteurs, those dangerous to security, and war prisoners. A Jewish Rabbi said that in his view 70 per cent, were Jews, but this. I think, is probably exaggerated. He said he had found 30 who w-ere doctors of medicine and five who were Pabbis. A man who is a doctor at Brussels had volunteered to make a nom•inal roll of the camp. So far ho has got 8000 names. I 'went behind the burial office to see a dozen S.S. guards who have been working on the burial. They all lay or sat on the ground in a state of .tiredness or exhaustion. They were eating soup off plates or drinking it out. of tins. They were pitiable specimens, some villainous; they were of various ages, one or two about 25, several 30 to 45, and one over 50. Outside the wire a group of women gathered and shouted abuse while our own soldiers shooed them off.

Dr. Kleine, the camp's doctor, was brought out to us, a short middle-aged man with frizzy grey hair. This man is believed to have injected petrol or paraffin into the men's veins at Auschwitz Camp to make them die at the time when, gas for the gas chamber had run short. Dr. Kleine denied doing this (to a companion who crossexamined him). He was today dressed in a khaki shirt stained with blood, grey breeches and knee boots. He had a wound half an inch deep, over his right eye. He had been reported to me as asjcing daily to be shot. He doubtless realises the fate awaiting him. Kleine and the S.S. guards were to be removed from the camp that day. Of the guards a soldier said to me; "They have just about had it". FOUGHT FOR FAT. I next went to the cooking- kitchen in charge now .of an English captain who was formerly the manager of Egalace Hotel, Buxton. He provides for 8000 from this cookhouse and estimates that 35,C00 are still in the camp. He said "ten per cent, cannot take anything like normal food—all sweets and fats make them sick and increase diarrhoea. Fat kills them olf immediately. What they , all ask /or is coffee without either sugar or milk, but we have not got it. We give two meals daily, a sort of rice pudding without rici\ and slew, first about. 9 a.m. and next about 3 p.m." He added that they had to find a fresh way of getting rid of tins as a man had been killed in fighting for them —they fought to get the fat off the tins.

We began to walk through (he camp and came on a queue of prisoners waiting (o get some hot tea. A soldier regulating them said to me deeply moved, "Why do human beings do this to other humans? It, gets us clown. They won't believe it at home." We eyed a queue together of men and women very ill and very thin, in rags and many hardly able to totter. He said, "They come and tell us they are ill.- We know they are ill. They are all ill. Yet what can we do ? Tea does them no good but what can be done?" lie was a sturdy fellow; a former Derbyshire county policeman. Emotional impact

of the camp is very great. Your senses are being assaulted most of the time. The camp looks about one mile long. The breadth is more difficult—perhaps two or three hundred yards for the most part, but the women's compound seems to run almost at right angles. The huts, of whioh there are perhaps sixty, are of one storey. The bunks are in three tiers. Living and dead have lain there together, 1000 and sometimes 1200 in a hut. The foulness of the air and the conditions in the huts can be imagined. After a. certain amount of clearing up for a week the stench inside is still very great. Fine work has been done during that week —several hundreds of both the fittest people and also those suffering from typhus have been taken out. But the sick folic still lie in those huts and as I walked through the camp I saw a largo number of ' men lying on the ground obviously near death. One or two were actually dead. A great many of the others were death walking about. Their pallor, their sunken eyes, their wrists, like sticks, and their feeble tottering—all of it appalling. And yet mixed with all these arc some who look tolerably well and I came across a couple of girls now and then who were smiling and looked well. Plainly these had not been in Belsen long. I was accompaniod to the burial ground by a Church of Scotland padre. We walked by a mound of shoes or shoe leather 10ft high and 80ft long and about 20ft broad—stuff once worn by living men now dead. CHILDREN SET ALIGHT.

1 aske<] the padre what words he spoke at the mass burial. Ho found it hard to remember, but said it held a phrase something like "i'cllow men and women done to death by your fellow men." We walked to an open grave, an immense rectangular pit filled with bodies not yet covered over—men, women, . and .children, mostly naked or nearly naked —an affront to God and man. And yet no more than 25 yards off among low heather-like scrub two young women lay in the sun as women do on a summer picnic and a few tents have been pitched within fifty yards. In an enormous square of old clothing taken oil' the dead a human being sat on his haunches picking it over. We walked over to the women's compound. A mother sat going through her child's hair as one has seen monkeys do. At a common miserable trough with cold water women were washing clothes as best they could. A padre invited us to lunch in the camp mess. With something of a. struggle one managed to eat. A Jewish Rabbi was present, lie said people are now dying liyom dysentery, typhus, and starvation — and from these combined with the shock of liberation. Those who might with iron determination have gone on living under the awful conditions were "ow collapsing in reaction. He wanted food given them to keep them alive till something better could be got. He spoke of ordinary coal ground up with potato peelings added. Even this would stop diarrhoea. He said ; "If all the heavens were paper and all the water in the world were ink and all the trees were turned into pens you ■couldn't even then record the suffering and horrors." He said that he has met in the camp those who escaped the gas chamber at Auschwitz. "In that camp," he told me, "lorry loads of children were tipped into pits, petrol poured over them and they were set on fire. , The commandant," he said, "had an orchestra. He would stand in front of it and tapping his foot to the music, put his hand on his chest and turning his thumb to left or right as the prisoners were filed before him, consign them to the gas chamber or allow them to live a while longer as suited his whim." He said. "To give a little of the better side, one S.S. woman here at Belsen tried to give the prisoners more food, but was not permitted."

We are doing fine work at Belsen. The ordinary English artilleryman, thrust into this awful task, has waded into it magnificently, ignoring the danger of typhus, labouring in distressing conditions, performing tasks that he never dreamt of. Yet far more, of conr.se, needs to be done, flow to do it short of increasing the number of men several times and adding numerous doctors, nurses pod a wealth of medicines and the right, food for the sick ? One is aghast, at the size of the problem. Nor. of course, is this the only camp. There is Bnchenwald. And we are on the point of liberating another near Zeven. WINDOW INTO GERMAN MIND. Belsen makes a wound in the mind. An American colonel described it to ine as a window into the German mind. Certainly it shows what; this - war is about and what we are lighting to destroy—or part of it, at all events. The camp is also evidence of how low mankind can fall, evidence that (his civilisation can be a thin veneer, that mankind still needs all the help it can get from good habits, tradition, and formality to help to maintain decent standards. It i.s lamentably, awfully true that to many of us this degradation and suffering is so affronting that you want to hurry away from it or else in a sense you get very slightly inured to it. Human beings can suffer and full so low in the scale that they no longer seem to be ordinary men and women, but something sub-human. It seems clear that the Germans had conditioned their S.S. men and women to regard Jews and these other prisoners as on a level with, let us say, beetles. The smell of eau de Cologne will now be offensive to' me as long as I live. It will recall Belsen. An armoured division I visited has made Gorman fanning folk in several villages file by pictures of Belsen, heading them '■German Kulture. Who is responsible?" And an officer has told them in a short speech that they cannot escape the blame. He said to me: "This area is probably as 'Liberal minded' as any in Germany and probably not typical* and I would say 90 per cent, of the Germans have been a.? distressed by these pictures as any ordinary people anywhere Mould be. One woman tried to excuse it saying they must have done something awful to merit it. We sent the burgomaster and a clergyman to Belsen. The parson i.s to preach against it tomorrow, but. the burgomaster was unmoved. Wo are having him replaced. One or two German women fainted on seeing the pictures."