Chapter 51: Apr 1945 Allies Liberate Buchenwald and Belsen Camps

It is deeply shocking and incomprehensible to me that despite volumes of documentation and living witnesses who can attest to the horrors of the Holocaust, there are still those who would deny it.

Mark Udall

Suddenly, just as the chaos of war was beginning to quiet down, the discovery of evil changed our thoughts from jubilation at approaching victory into revulsion at the crimes committed by the Third Reich in the name of racial purity.

The Nazi death camp or concentration camp called Buchenwald was discovered by advance elements of General Patton’s Third Army as they swooped down on the fatherland with a vengeance of an eye for an eye. It was situated not far from the town of Weimar in Germany and was historically known as a center of culture and hospitality. When the camp was originally set up in the 1930s, it was designated as a place for dangerous anti-Nazi males not females or children. That later was changed and there were many sub-camps that were used for medical experimentation and females were transferred in from other camps to be used in brothels for the fatherland.

Communists and anti-Hitler domestic terrorists were sent there for eventual execution. There even was a contingent of about 160 prisoners of war caught not wearing their uniforms after attempting to escape from custody. They were to be punished as “spies” against the Third Reich and most of them were executed or were starved to death.

As the American Army drove close to the camp, the Germans attempted to erase all evidence of the slaughter by killing the survivors and burying them in mass graves right on the premises. The core Communist inmates staged an uprising and actually took over the camp only hours before the Americans arrived to liberate them.

The nearby town of Weimar was heavily bombed and the remaining survivors did their best to hide from the escaping prisoners. They mostly professed ignorance of the camp but that was difficult to believe since they had witnessed the prisoners being transported into the camp and never saw anyone leave alive.

After the war, the camp became a prison for the Russian forces that used it to punish the Nazi SS members between 1945 and 1950.

Bergen-Belsen or just simply “Belsen” was a concentration camp that was liberated by the British Army and it was located inside the designated British zone of occupation. It was a notorious death camp and hundreds of thousands of inmates were either executed or simply allowed to starve to death during the course of the war. Many of the victims were Russian prisoners of war sent to the camp to perform labor.

It was originally designed to be a prisoner exchange camp to transfer inmates to allied custody in return for German prisoners of war in other countries. That was a program that looked good on paper but it was never a valid reality in the chaos of World War Two. Eventually, it evolved into another concentration camp with the express purpose of exterminating all enemies of the Third Reich that had fallen into the hands of the Gestapo and were deemed dangerous by the SS.

Over twenty thousand Russian prisoners of war were killed in Belsen, most of them in the late stages of the war. An additional fifty thousand mostly Jewish inmates died at the hands of the Nazis in Belsen and they were pushed into mass graves marked only by a mound of grass covered dirt and a sign that gave the total number of bodies under the ground.

When the camp was liberated by British troops in 1945, there were still over sixty thousand survivors in extremely bad shape left alive and still breathing. A third of those were dead in a matter of a few weeks. Those that were left described in great detail the horrors of life inside a death camp and their voices were heard at the war crimes trials in Nurnburg after the war.

I spent a few weeks there in the 1950s when we were ordered to take our tanks off the border at the Fulda Gap and conduct live firing exercises at the British firing range near the camp. I remember that the place seemed strangely quiet when the tanks were not firing on the firing range and I could almost hear the hint of whispers in the air from the many bodies buried under the turf wailing out their anger at the horrors of the Nazi death camp. The sound of the flapping wings of birds passing overhead made me look up into the cloudless sky wondering why God was so uninvolved in the entire affair that took place inside the Belsen camp and in so many other camps of a similar nature in that chaotic time in Europe. Maybe it wasn’t just my imagination but a reminder so simply stated in the Jewish promise of “Never Again!”

These two camps were located inside of Germany. In point of fact, most of the concentration camps of the Third Reich were located outside the borders of pre-war Germany and the extermination of the Jews was in full swing even at the end of the war as the camps were being overrun by the allied troops. There can be no doubt that the prospect of being actually sent to a SS run concentration camp was something ordinary Germans viewed as a sentence of death and to be avoided at all cost.

Matilda entertained Nancy and me by telling us stories that she must have learned around the Gypsy campfires when she was traveling with them from town to town. It was difficult not to like the girl. She was an absolute bundle of energy and she made no effort to hide her emotions from anyone.