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| INTRODUCTION |
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| I |
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By the beginning of April, 1945, the war
against Germany was nearly finished, and on all sides Allied troops were
penetrating the Fatherland. On the 12th April the German Military Commander at
Bergen approached the Commander of the Allied Forces in that area with a view
to negotiating a local truce in respect of the concentration camp at
Bergen-Belsen; his declared purpose in so doing being the prevention of the
spread of typhus, which had broken out in the camp.
On the same day an
agreement was reached between chief of Staff 1st Parachute Army, Military
Commandant Bergen, and Brigadier General Staff, 8 Corps. The general purpose of
this agreement was the prevention of fighting in the area of the camp, and
consequently the segregation of the typhus patients therein.
On the,
15th April, the first British officer arrived at the camp. This was Captain
(then Lieutenant) D. A. Sington, a German-speaking officer in charge of an
amplifying unit, who had come to inform the inmates of the camp that the
Germans had left and that the Allies had taken over. Shortly afterwards a
number of other officers and other ranks arrived at the camp; of these the most
important were Lieut.-Colonel Taylor, R.A., Officer Commanding 63rd Anti-Tank
Regiment, R.A., who (with one of his Batteries) was to undertake the
administration of the camp, and Brigadier H.L. Hughes, Deputy Medical Services,
Second Army, who was to be responsible for the medical organization of the
camp.
On arrival at the camp these officers discovered the conditions
which were to astonish and horrify the world a day or so later. Briefly, there
were in a camp of the approximate dimensions of 1500 by 350 metres were
confined about 40,000 men and women in the most extreme state of starvation and
emaciation, many of them suffering from typhus; that there were, in addition,
13,000 unburied corpses, and that for the living there was little food, less
sleeping and living accommodation, and no medical assistance.
All these
matters were the subject of sensational accounts in the newspapers, and Belsen
became the symbol of all that had been told (and scarcely credited) of the
vileness and rottenness of the Nazi system. Other camps were unearthed as the
Allied armies moved forward, and some of them were worse than Belsen, at least
with regard to their calculated savagery and cruelty. But Belsen, because it
was the first |
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