<roneal@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message news:47094732-fa65-
Typhus was indeed rampant at the camps, but typhus does not kill by
emaciating its victims to skin and bones.>>
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/bergenbelsen/Introduction.html
Anne Frank, the most famous victim of the Holocaust, lies in an unmarked
mass grave at Bergen-Belsen, the date of her death unknown. Both Anne and
her sister Margot died in the camp during one of the world's largest
epidemics of typhus, a disease which is spread by body lice.
The Journal of the American Medical Association wrote about the epidemic
in
a 1945 issue:
By negotiations between British and German officers, British troops took
over from the SS and the Wehrmacht the task of guarding the vast
concentration camp at Belsen, a few miles northwest of Celle, which
contains
60,000 prisoners, many of them political. This has been done because
typhus
is rampant in the camp and it is vital that no prisoners be released until
the infection is checked. The advancing British agreed to refrain from
bombing or shelling the area of the camp, and the Germans agreed to leave
behind an armed guard which would be allowed to return to their own lines
a
week after the British arrival.
General Dwight D. Eisenhower anticipated that future generations might
find
it hard to believe the horror that they found when Nazi Germany was
liberated by the Allies. He ordered that both the Ohrdruf camp and the
Buchenwald camp be preserved for several weeks in the state in which they
were found and German civilians in nearby towns were forced to visit the
camps to view the piles of rotting bodies. American soldiers, newspaper
re****ters and Congressmen were also called in as witnesses to the Nazi
atrocities. But it was the British who had the biggest impact on the
public
conscience when they released their newsreel film of Bergen-Belsen to
movie
theaters around the world in the last days of the war. This was something
that Himmler had not anticipated when he negotiated with the British to
voluntarily turn the camp over to them. And he certainly didn't expect
that
the staff members, who had voluntarily stayed behind in the camp, would be
arrested, or that some of the Hungarian soldiers, who were assigned to
help
with the surrender of the camp, would be shot by the British.
As early as June 1942, there had been stories circulated by British radio
about the Nazi death camps and Jews being killed in gas chambers, but few
people in America believed it. The death camps in Poland had been
discovered
by the Soviets, starting on July 23, 1944, when the Majdanek camp just
outside Lublin was liberated. On January 27, 1945, a day that is now
commemorated as National Remembrance Day in Europe, the largest Nazi death
camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau had been discovered by the Soviet army. These
stories had been re****ted in the press, but Americans were still unaware
of
just how horrifying the Nazi camps actually were. When the film of
Bergen-Belsen was shown in American theaters, it was naturally assumed
that
the prisoners had been deliberately starved to death or killed in a gas
chamber, since the film made no mention of the typhus epidemic in the
camp.
Nor was it mentioned that the water pump at Bergen-Belsen had been hit by
Allied bombs and fresh water had to be brought in by trucks.
When British soldiers were finally allowed, as agreed upon in the
negotiations, to enter Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, they at first saw
nothing amiss. Smiling, healthy prisoners came out to greet them and some
of
the 500 children in the camp cheered and waved to them. But as they
advanced
further into the camp, they were stunned by the sight of over 10,000
unburied ****d bodies. The horror was beyond human imagination. The
sickening stench of the rotting corpses was so great that British soldiers
later claimed that they could smell the camp from a distance of 10 miles.
In the last months of the war, as the Russian army advanced westward,
prisoners in the camps in Poland had been evacuated and ultimately 60,000
prisoners had been crowded into the Bergen-Belsen camp which did not have
enough space for them. Some of those who were still alive at Bergen-Belsen
were walking skeletons. There were a variety of diseases that were rampant
in the camp.
The Germans claimed that they had been unable to fix the broken water pump
which had been destroyed by Allied bombs, and many inmates were dying of
thirst, even though the camp was near a creek which the camp Commandant
claimed was not fit for drinking. The camp used cisterns for its water
supply, but the water could not be accessed without the electric pump that
had been hit in a bombing raid.
The British promptly fixed the broken pump and provided water from the
creek
for the camp which had been without water for six days. The nearby Army
garrison had arranged for drinking water to be brought to the camp by
truck,
but it was not nearly enough.
Some of the female German guards, who had only arrived in the camp a
couple
of weeks before the liberation, appeared to be overweight, while many of
the
surviving prisoners appeared to be starving. The German Army garrison had
facilities for baking 60,000 loaves of bread daily, but they had been
providing only 10,000 loaves per day to the concentration camp, while
keeping the rest to feed the German soldiers. The Camp Commandant had to
scrounge for food in the countryside which was in the middle of a war
zone.
According to the British, the camp had been without food for six days, and
there were no medical supplies at all.
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