Belsen in History and Memory

David Cesarani, Tony Kushner, Jo Reilly, Colin Richmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135251376
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Drawing on documentary and oral sources in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Dutch and French, this book challenges many sterotypes about Belsen, and reinstates the groups hitherto marginalized or ignored in accounts of the camp and its liberation.

PART I: INTRODUCTION

Approaching Belsen: An
Introduction

I

In a century that has witnessed ever-increasing opportunities for voyeurism, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp by British forces in April 1945 has special significance.¹ Although Nazi camps of a far more murderous nature were liberated before Belsen, the scenes recorded at Belsen by the soldiers, journalists, photographers, broadcasters and film crews were perhaps the most gruesome of all images relating to Nazi atrocities. The impact on those carrying out the liberation of Belsen, as will be stressed throughout this volume, was traumatic. Yet even those in the comfort of the cinemas, front rooms and libraries of the Home Front exposed to the newsreels, press and radio reports were left in a state of emotional shock by the attempts to communicate the horror of Belsen. Susan Sontag relates how in a Santa Monica bookstore she came across photographs from Bergen-Belsen and Dachau in July 1945:

Nothing I have seen – in photographs or in real life – ever cut me as sharply, deeply, instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it was several years before I understood fully what they were about [editors’ emphasis].

As a young child growing up in the United States, Sontag’s lack of wider context in which to place these photographed atrocities is neither surprising nor unusual. But her simplistic comment as late as 1979 that these were ‘the first photographs of the Nazi camps’ (rather than the first such images of two idiosyncratic western concentration camps with very different histories at the time of their liberation) indicates that even for a culturally aware individual, such as Sontag, the process of understanding ‘what they were about’ was ongoing well after the end of the Second World War. Indeed, the 50th anniversary commemorations of the war revealed that this working out was still far from complete. Moreover, the intervention of memory and myth had further confused and obscured the meaning of those images with regard to the specific function of Belsen and its place in the history of the Holocaust.²

From the last months of 1994 through to the ‘VE Day’ celebrations in May 1995, brief film clips and photographs from Belsen frequently framed media representations of the Second World War in its last stages and the Holocaust as a whole. The lack of sensitivity in the use of such images (and in particular specific scenes such as the bulldozing of dead bodies into the mass graves of Belsen) was indicative of the failure to understand, or in any way to confront, the complexity of what was actually being portrayed. The feelings, for example, of survivors in relation to these images was overshadowed by the desire to communicate other messages. The repugnant figures were being reproduced to show the nature of Nazism (and therefore, the reflected decency of the western Allies), rather than the immeasurable damage caused to the Jewish people and others in Europe.

Such representation echoed that of 50 years earlier when the horror images were shown as part of a formal and informal attempt against collective amnesia. Thus LEST WE FORGET: THE HORROR OF NAZI CONCENTRATION CAMPS REVEALED FOR ALL TIME IN THE MOST TERRIBLE PHOTOGRAPHS EVER PUBLISHED, compiled by the Daily Mail and mass-circulated in the early summer of 1945 reproduced image after image so as to ‘maintain the loathing for all that Hitler and the Nazis represented’. The book was ‘a constant reminder to the British people of the menace they have beaten’. The hundreds of photographs of the victims were accompanied by captions such as ‘Wrecks of Humanity’. The survivors were contrasted with the demonic SS men and women of the camp and were represented as merely ‘an example of their brutality’. Even the penultimate page of photographs, which was accompanied with the question ‘CAN THEY FORGET?’, presented two survivors looking terrified and without any hint of individuality.³

Who were these victims? In LEST WE FORGET, as in so much else of the instant atrocity material of 1945, they were simply identified through the concentration camp in which they had been liberated – there are no names, personal histories or anything else that would undermine their use merely as illustrators of the true nature of Nazism. In 1958, the French government attempted to remove the remains of its ‘own’ nationals from Belsen with the intention of re-interring them in France. The response of Brigadier Glyn Hughes, Chief British Medical Officer at Belsen was clear:

It was I who gave the order to dig the mass graves. Even at the time there was no possibility whatsoever to identify any of the victims. I was, therefore, astonished to hear in Paris a French minister say that it was still possible to sort out and remove the Frenchmen from the mass graves. Medically speaking it is, of course, an absurdity; morally there seems no reason for such an attempt.’⁴

If the dead of Belsen remained understandably unidentifiable, much the same was true (though with far less justification) for attitudes towards the survivors. Problems of communication, which went way beyond the basic problem of different languages, hindered a general comprehension that most of the victims had come from other camps from across Europe designed to exterminate every last Jew. More critically in coming to terms with the common humanity of the liberators and survivors, was a lack of awareness relating to the diverse lives of the latter before the war. There was a sense, even amongst the most sympathetic of observers and relief workers, that the victims would never be able to recover either physically or mentally. It would be hard to conceive, for example, of the sheer ordinariness of a London youth football team of 1948 represented on the cover of The Journal of Holocaust Education (Winter 1995) made up of child survivors of the camps.⁵

In turn, this lack of faith in them having any future was mirrored by a lack of concern about their past. The victims’ grotesque state in April 1945 thus dominated overall consideration of them as human beings at the time of their liberation. In addition, in countries with such diverse war histories as Britain, the United States and France, there was little consideration of the fact that most of those liberated at Belsen were Jewish. This tendency in large part reflected a refusal to accept the uniqueness of the Jewish plight in the war under the Nazi onslaught. Although increasingly detailed information became available to the western allies about the ‘Final Solution’ from the summer of 1941 onwards, the material was rarely assimilated either by the state or public.⁶

It was frequently said during the 1995 commemorations that the camp liberation’s in spring 1945 ‘brought home the reality of the Holocaust’. In fact, neither the specifically anti-Semitic nature of Nazi atrocities nor the particular role of the western camps was understood at the time. LEST WE FORGET was actually unusual in mentioning, if only in one sentence, Auschwitz ‘where it is reported [though inaccurately as we now know; the figure was closer to 1,500,000], at least 4,000,000 people were done to death in circumstances of peculiar horror’. It was typical, however, in mixing together indiscriminately a whole list of Nazi camps. The booklet’s suggestion that ‘The butcher’s hooks, the ovens, the gas-chambers were common to all the camps’ represented another common misconception, although it was equally believed in 1945 that the western camps, without the apparatus of mass murder, were by far the worst in the Nazi system.⁷

How far were contemporary distortions of Belsen and the other western concentration camps corrected in the 50-year commemorations? In one crucial respect, the events and reflections of 1995 did restore a sense of proportion missing in the last six months of the war: Auschwitz, whose liberation by Soviet troops was hardly noticed in the western world in January 1945, became the focal point of Holocaust remembrance. At the time of its liberation anniversary, the events and visits to this most murderous of camps received world-wide and sustained coverage in which the Jewishness of up to 90 per cent of its victims was generally acknowledged – in spite of renewed Polish-Jewish conflict over the site. Moreover, the voices of those who had survived were, at long last, given prominence in media coverage allowing them the individuality so lacking 50 years earlier. Indeed, the attention given to Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald in April/May 1945 rather than stimulating an interest in camps of mass, systematic murder, had the reverse effect.⁸

It has taken a long time in post-war consciousness to even out the imbalance in the awareness of eastern as opposed to western camps and to recognise the centrality of Auschwitz within the implementation of the ‘Final Solution’. It is significant, therefore, with regard to the future memory of the Holocaust, that subsequent to the Auschwitz commemorations in 1995, the German parliament has designated 27 January as ‘National Memorial Day for victims of Nazism and genocide’. Indeed, the danger is now that Auschwitz has become so dominant as a metaphor for the ‘Final Solution’ (and evil more generally), that other sites and experiences relating to the Holocaust will be neglected in the popular imagination. That the anniversaries in spring 1995 of the western camps’ liberations received less attention than Auschwitz was thus not in itself a major cause for concern. More dangerous, however, were the ongoing tendencies to distort the histories of the western camps and to fail to contextualise their liberation other than as part of the Allied war narrative.⁹

Although the history of Belsen, with its changing functions within the Nazi state and its constantly fluctuating population, was complex in the extreme, there is little excuse 50 years later for the continuing inability of those inside and outside the media to understand its true nature. This is especially the case in an area of very popular misunderstanding about Belsen – that gas chambers were used to exterminate its victims. Confusion that the presence of crematoria in Belsen implied the existence and use of gas chambers, as well as a more general belief that all Nazi camps were designed to murder Jews in such a manner, probably explain why so many still make this fundamental error. It is one which Nazi apologists in the form of Holocaust deniers have been quick to seize upon.¹⁰

It was thus particularly regrettable that the major international documentary on the camp liberation’s to emerge from the fiftieth anniversary commemorations (Rex Bloomstein’s Liberation) unwittingly added to the popular mythology. Captain Robert Daniell, a British army veteran, was interviewed in Bloomstein’s film shown on 22 January 1995 and also in a national British quality Sunday newspaper a week earlier. Daniell recounted how he was the first British soldier to go into Belsen and how he ‘saw the gas ovens, which had been cleaned out because there was no fuel to run them. This was why there were so many corpses lying around … It was pathetic. There were worn paths to each of the gas chambers and on the side a pile of spectacles at least 6ft high.’

Daniell’s recollections (‘It is as clear to me now as it was then’) at the time of the 1995 anniversaries was a classic example of the role of myth in the construction of personal testimony. But that it should be used so unthinkingly in an area where memory has become so blatantly politicised for neo-Nazi/anti-Semitic purposes was unforgivable. Belsen, for the sake of convenience and a good story, had become indistinguishable from Auschwitz. History was being rewritten. The most horrible images available of Nazi atrocities, or what the Daily Telegraph at the time of VE Day Commemorations called ‘the exemplar of Nazi evil’, had to be connected to the by now most infamous symbol of the extermination programme, the gas chamber.¹¹

A similar distorting process can be seen at work in the film version of Robert Harris’ important novel, Fatherland (1992). A thriller based on the January 1942 Wannsee conference, Harris carried out careful research to make sure that his account of the ‘Final Solution’ up to 1942 (after that date the history provided is counter-factual) was accurate. The work is based on a post-war Europe which is still dominated by National Socialist Germany, although the war in the east continues to be fought with the USA backing the USSR. The ‘Final Solution’ has been carried out but its existence concealed. The possibility of a new relationship between the Americans and Germans is threatened, however, by the seeping out of information concerning the fate of the Jews. In the far inferior film version of the book, which was released just before the Auschwitz commemorations, those seeking to convince the Americans and themselves of the ‘Final Solution’ use the standard horror images from the western camps. Faced with the obscure nature of Nazi euphemisms in documents relating to the extermination campaign, the photographs convey to the film audience ‘the reality’ of what had taken place. The dialogue between the heroine (an American journalist) and the hero (a renegade SS officer) at a time of high tension within the film is dramatic but dangerously misleading:

‘They killed all the Jews.’

‘What happened at Auschwitz and Belsen? What was Zyklon B?’

‘They killed them with gas.’¹²

Harris, a history graduate of Cambridge, had done his homework (appropriately enough in the context of this volume at the Wiener Library). If anything, his book has a pedagogic mission to explain the details of the ‘Final Solution’ as his characters discover the secrets of the Nazi racial new order:

‘I don’t understand … Here, for example – what is “Zyklon B”?’

‘Crystallised hydrogen cyanide. Before that, they used carbon monoxide. Before that bullets.’

‘And here – “Auschwitz/Birkenau”. “Kulmhof [Chelmno]”. “Belzec”. “Treblinka”. “Majdanek”. “Sobibor”.’

‘The killing grounds.’

‘These figures: eight thousand a day …’

‘That’s the total they could destroy at Auschwitz/Birkenau using the four gas chambers and crematoria.’

Harris’s list of camps – later the hero shouts them out defiantly as he is tortured – is not without possible criticism. The ‘Operation Reinhard’ camps, which exclude Chelmno, were designed specifically to murder the Jews of the General Government and are mixed together by Harris with Auschwitz and Majdanek with their more complex functions. Nevertheless, nowhere in his text does the author refer to Belsen. In the film version it is more than possible that the camp of Belzec, which has little popular resonance even though it was the first purpose built camp with gassing facilities, is transmogrified into the more infamous Belsen with its related images. It should also be mentioned that the failure in the film to retain reference to Belzec is an example of the dangers referred to earlier of an overly Auschwitz-centred Holocaust remembrance.¹³

The efforts, however, of historians and others who have fought hard to get the differences between concentration camp and extermination camp within the Nazi system recognised did not go unrewarded in the spring of 1995. Although fatigue had set in with regard to reporting camp liberation commemorations, some were particularly anxious to get the history of Belsen ‘ri...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• I Introduction
• II The History of Bergen-Belsen
• III The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen
• IV Conclusion
• Appendix Belsen Testimonies: The Camp and its Liberation
• List of Contributors
• Index