Belsen 60 years ago – an episode we must never forget (from the London Scottish Regimental Gazette)
Belsen Concentration Camp lay some 60 miles south of Hamburg.
In the spring of 1945, the British 8th Corps was fighting the 1st German Parachute Army in North West Germany. On 12th April the German Chief of Staff asked the British to take over Belsen as typhus was raging in the Camp. A truce was arranged and the British moved in on 15th April.
The Camp was in two sections, part of the Panzer Training School consisting of barrack blocks, bath houses, a cinema and a proper hospital, part three miles away where about 40,000 men and women were crammed into 82 wooden huts; lying about in heaps were some 10,000 decomposing bodies with more piled into a huge mass grave.
British military medical services were overstretched, there was still a war going on. The British Red Cross sent ninety-seven senior medical students, of which I was one, to help. We were housed in the Panzer Training School. Two or three students were allocated to each hut. Mine was in the Women’s area and sported a Russian Flag on one end and a Polish one on the other. It was about 100 x 20 x 8 feet. The stench both inside and outside the hut was overpowering, faecal, putrid, brown, loud and never to be forgotten.
Three tier bunks were crammed inside. They were inhabited; one person on top, one in the middle and two in the bottom layer. Most of the women were naked. They were all skeletons, just skin over bones, no muscle or fat. They and the bunks were filthy, covered in shit. The floor was carpeted by a soft jelly of old faeces. If those on top urinated or had diarrhoea, the mess dribbled down onto those below. One patient was typical of the rest. She has black matted hair, shimmering with lice, her ribs stood out, a bare skeleton. She was defecating, too weak to lift her buttocks so the liquid stools bubbled over her thighs. Her feet were swollen and podgy, her hands covered in crusted scabs from scabies. She whimpered if she was touched.
The hut was silent.
The Red Cross gave each student a satchel containing ten aspirin, some charcoal pellets, twenty opium tablets, two triangular bandages, two packets of lint, four finger bandages, a yard of one inch sticky tape and a pair of blunt scissors. Available too were some cigarettes and a large packet of fruit drops.
By crawling over the bunks, it was possible to count the women – 300 unable to move, more were mobile. It was obvious that water and food were more necessary than the medicines we had not got.
About 400 yards away was a cookhouse run by a gunner sergeant, who gave us a trolley, two large drums, one of brown soup and the other of milk and some tin jugs. We pulled the trolley to the hut and crawled amongst the women giving them milk or soup. There was no water. Everything was covered in shit. No point in wiping your hands on your handkerchief.
The patients suffered from large abscesses, bedsores, protrusion of the bowel from the anus, scabies, extending up their hands and arms and some were hot and feverish. Some were coughing, many seemed to be dying and some were already dead.
At one end of the hut were a group of Russians, Ukrainians really, who were cheerful and organised, after all they had won the war. They all wore shoes. At the other end were some Poles most of whom were pregnant.
Next day, one group of medical students were put in charge of some Hungarian soldiers and gangs of local villagers to tidy up each hut, turning them into ‘wards’. The fitter women were evacuated to the Panzer Camp and the bunk beds repaired. One patient to each bunk and some clothing to lie on and cover them.
Food and drink did the trick; most of the patients got better and after about two weeks all were evacuated to the Panzer Camp and the Belsen huts were burnt by flame throwers.
Doctor Alan MacAuslan |