大象传媒

Message 1 - Re: Belsen - One Man's Journey

Posted on: 17 July 2005 by Peter - WW2 Site Helper

Dear Lawrence

Your grandfather would have had three medals, rather than one: the 1939-45 Star, the France and Germany Star, and the Defence Medal - there is, however, no such decoration as the 'Air Defence Medal'. His service in France would have been from D-Day 6 June 1944, at the very earliest, unless he was in the Dieppe Raid of 19 August 1942 (but most unlikely from the unit he was in); there were no British Troops in France between June 1940 and June 1944.

I read your description of Belsen with interest and I share your horror of it. Could I, however, respectfully clear up one or two points.

The location of Bergen-Belsen was 11 miles north of Celle. The complex was initially used as a prisoner of war camp and held about 600 Belgian and French PoWs (this was Stalag 311), but this was before 1941. In July 1941, it was expanded and 20,000 Russian PoWs were brought to it. It was from then that it began its slow but steady slide into a chamber of horrors. The Russians were sifted and all commissars sent to Auschwitz for immediate execution (murder, I think, being a more correct word). But they were perhaps lucky, for by February 1942, only 2,097 of the Russian PoWs survived in Belsen (euphemistically then still called Stalag 311), the rest had starved to death.

In July 1943 it was opened up as a concentration camp for Jews, from then on holding an average of 95,000 prisoners. As you say, there were no gas chambers in Belsen, Jews were simply worked to death through gruellingly harsh forced labour. Belsen was also, surprisingly, used as a transit camp for Jews that the Germans intended to barter. Martin Gilbert in "The Holocaust - The Jewish Tragedy" records, regarding some Jews from Salonika who happened to be Spanish subjects that "[In February 1943]... the Spanish government intervened. Instead of being sent to Birkenau, all 367 Spanish subjects were transferred by train to the concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. There, they were exempted from forced labour, and six months later, were sent to Spain, and to safety". These more fortunate inmates wore their own clothes with the obligatory Star of David, but all others were further stripped of their dignity by having to wear coarse striped prison garb and, of course, the Star of David. You also mention death by "sadistic medical experiments", but I am not aware that any were carried out at Belsen.

Dutch Jews were indeed sent there, and Belsen is the hell hole in which Anne Franks died. Nor were all Jews so fortunate as the Sephardi Jews saved by the Spanish - on 23 October 1943, to reduce overcrowding, 1,750 Polish Jews were sent from Belsen to Birkenau, a camp of the vast Auschwitz/Birkenau complex, and immediately gassed. But it worked both ways, at the end of October 1944 the gassing of Jews ended at Birkenau and many of the survivors were sent by train or marched to Belsen to die there; the first of the death-marches, as they came to be known. Anne Frank's mother Edith died in Birkenau, after the gassing stopped, in January 1945, but Anne had been taken from Birkenau to Belsen in October with her older sister, both to perish there. I mention these facts because it was mainly Jews who died at Belsen, some 35,000 to 50,000, the exact figure will be never known.

For a fuller history of Belsen go here: ^{About links}

Best regards,

Peter