Collateral damage

Seventy years ago today, the 11^th Armoured Division of the British army was pushing through northern Germany (in the general vicinity of Hanover) when they came across something they must have thought was unimaginable. Even given what they’d already seen in nearly six years of total war.

They entered the cluster of prison camps known as Bergen-Belsen, which over the years had housed Jews, POWs, political prisoners, Roma, “asocials” (which covered a wide range of behaviors the Nazis didn’t like), criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and homosexuals. Starting in the last months of 1944, it became a collection camp for thousands of Jewish prisoners evacuated from camps ahead of the advancing Red Army in the East. (And by “evacuated” I mean “forced marches in winter without food or shelter or adequate clothing.")

So what the soldiers of the 11^th found on 15 April 1945 was 60,000 gaunt, sick humans (men, women, children) in ragged, filthy tatters of clothing. There was a typhus outbreak, and the prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 per day. And more than 13,000 corpses in various stages of decomposition, were scattered around the grounds.

Imagine, if you can, what it would be like—even being a soldier—to come across this kind of horror; cruelty and killing on an industrial scale. You’ve never seen anything like this, never heard of it. Nothing in text books, no tales on the radio or in the newsreels. You’re just marching through the fields of Germany, and you start to smell something really, really bad. And then you walk into a compound that is so nightmarish that you have no vocabulary to describe it, even to yourself. You have no point of reference, so it’s as though you just walked into a nightmare world where nothing connects properly.

And yet, there it is, all around you. The sights, the stench, the sounds; tens of thousands of human shells, who also find the sight of you unbelievable.

Sadly—these days, were we to stumble upon, for example, mass graves in Bosnia, we would be able to say, “Oh, yes. Genocide. Mass rape and torture. I know what this is. It’s revolting, but I know what this is.” In 1945—not so much.

One member of an official film unit described the jumbles of corpses:

“The bodies were a ghastly sight. Some were green. They looked like skeletons covered with skin—the flesh had all gone. There were bodies of small children among the grown ups. In other parts of the camp there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled five or six high.”

Perhaps the most famous description of what these soldiers encountered was by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, which I share with you here.

However, the voice I recall is of a British medical officer in a permanent exhibition at the Imperial War Museum, which recorded his account of working with the prisoners. He spoke of being completely overwhelmed by the numbers of patients—not one of the 60,000 was healthy. They had typhus, they had dysentery, they had all manner of diseases and injuries, all compounded by malnutrition, exhaustion, exposure and beatings.

This MO spoke of having to make choices of whom to treat and whom to let die, on the basis of who was most likely to benefit from treatment and survive. He couldn’t treat everyone; not everyone would recover. The one that I recall (and I heard this in 1996) was choosing between two sisters, both of whom were very sick, but one more so than the other. He had to treat the slightly healthier one and let the weaker one die. The anguish in this man’s voice was palpable, all those decades later.

It tore my heart into pieces to think of a physician having to make those kinds of choices. I wondered if, in the remaining years of his life, he was able to take solace in the lives he’d saved, or whether the only faces he saw were the ones he’d turned away from.

To me, this is part of the cost of letting evil like Nazism take hold, of giving it space, of providing it weapons and not standing up to it until it’s barging through your door. Collateral damage, I suppose you’d call it—the nightmares carried by the soldiers of the 11^th Armoured, and other units that discovered other camps—for the rest of their lives.