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https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14607551/The-horror-Bergen-Belsen-80-years-British-troops-60-000-barely-alive-inmates-liberated-Nazi-camp-Anne-Frank-died.html

The horror of Bergen-Belsen 80 years on: How British troops found 60,000 barely alive inmates when they liberated Nazi camp where Anne Frank died

    WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT

By HARRY HOWARD, HISTORY EDITOR

Published: 01:56, 15 April 2025 | Updated: 08:09, 15 April 2025

They were scenes that brought home to the British people the full horror of Nazi depravity.  Eighty years ago today the British Army's 11th Armoured Division liberated Bergen-Belsen, the concentration camp in northern Germany.  Inside, they found 60,000 barely alive Jewish victims of the Holocaust, many of them suffering from typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis.  Scattered everywhere were the skeletal bodies of those who had already perished, as the stench of death lingered in the air.  Some had died directly at the hands of the camp's depraved commandant Josef Kramer, camp doctor Fritz Klein and guards who included whip-wielding Irma Grese.  All three monsters were executed on the same day later in 1945 by British hangman Albert Pierrepoint.   Among those for whom the British rescue came too late was Anne Frank, the Dutch teenager whose diary would go on to captivate the world.  She died at Belsen just weeks earlier in February or March 1945 - alongside her sister Margot.  The BBC's Richard Dimbleby, accompanying the liberating British troops, summed up the unimaginably monstrous scenes in a radio broadcast to the nation that would go down in history.  It was a report so graphic and distressing that Dimbleby's BBC bosses wanted to suppress it, with the broadcaster describing how he found himself 'in the world of a nightmare'.  Marking today's anniversary, Belsen survivor Mala Tribich, 94, told the PA news agency: 'Whatever I know, whatever I went through, I have not forgotten, because you don't forget that.  I hope that nothing like that will ever happen again, and of course, it's up to us to guard against it, and I hope that some people have learned the lessons.  We have seen that it could happen again, and we must take every step not to let it.'

Belsen had originally been set up to house Soviet prisoners of war but was then turned into a concentration camp in 1943.  The camp in northern Germany housed some of the Jews who had been rounded up in Poland, the Netherlands, Hungary and other areas.  Many inmates had been forced on 'death marches' to Belsen from Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in occupied Poland.  Many were suffering from typhus, dysentery and tuberculosis. Overall, around 70,000 people died at Belsen.  The camp's horrors were documented on film by soldier-cameramen Sergeant Mike Lewis and Sergeant Bill Lawrie.  As members of the British Army's Film and Photographic Unit, they accompanied the British troops who liberated the camp.  Their film revealed the full horrors to the world for the first time.  The footage was shown to Britons again earlier this month in BBC documentary What They Found, which was directed by acclaimed director Sam Mendes.   The documentary narrates the footage with interviews carried out with Sergeant Lewis and Sergeant Lawrie in the 1980s.  Mrs Tribich was transported to Belsen with her cousin in early 1945.  Then aged just 14, she had already endured unimaginable horrors.  Born in 1930 in Piotrkow Trybunalski in Poland, she was around nine years old when the Nazis invaded.  Her family were forced to move into a ghetto the first one established in Poland.  She was temporarily taken to Czestochowa, where she tried to pass as a Christian relative of a family her parents had paid to look after her until deportations at the ghetto were over.  After some weeks, she returned to the ghetto, shortly after which her mother and eight-year-old sister were rounded up and murdered in a local forest.  Mrs Tribich became a slave labourer until November 1944 when she was separated from her father and brother and deported to the Ravensbruck concentration camp with her younger cousin.  After about 10 weeks, Ms Tribich and her cousin were transported in cattle trucks to Bergen-Belsen, spending their first night in a big tent outside the camp with arrivals from all over Europe.  Mrs Tribich had her possessions bundled up in a handkerchief, including a piece of bread that she was keeping for her little cousin, which was stolen in the short time she dozed off that first night.  'It couldn't have been for long but when I woke up my bundle was gone and it was like losing my worldly possessions,' she said. 'There wasn't much in it, but I felt, how could anybody do it?'

The following day they were taken into the camp.  'The scene that hit me was, first of all, there was a terrible smell,' Mrs Tribich said.

'There was a smell and a smog and there were people there but they were like skeletons and they were sort of shuffling along aimlessly and as they were shuffling they would die.  And there were piles of corpses. I remember one very big pile and small piles and the people were just dropping dead, literally.  There was a sort of turmoil and a slow movement of people and it was horrific.'

She overheard that there was a children's home in the camp where she and her cousin were accepted.  'That was a real bit of luck because we wouldn't have survived in the main camp,' Mrs Tribich said.

She spent some months there ill with typhus and said she does not remember much of liberation day because she was so sick.  Of April 15 1945, she said: 'I was on my upper bunk and I must have come to consciousness and when I looked out the window and there were people running towards the gate. I didn't know why or where actually but that was the liberation when the British took the camp.'

She added that she was left waiting in the empty barracks for two days before British troops came for her with a stretcher.  Mrs Tribich recalled: 'They were going to put me on the stretcher and I said: "No, that's all right, I can do it myself."  So I just tried to get out and I just collapsed. I wouldn't have been able to walk.'

She was transferred to a hospital before reuniting with her brother, Ben, in England in March 1947.  Dimbleby's 10-minute radio report was not broadcast until a few days after the journalist visited, because the broadcaster's bosses believed the public did not have the stomach for his words, and nor were they entirely sure that the report was reliable.  But Dimbleby, the father of esteemed broadcasting brothers David and Jonathan, made it clear that he would resign if his words were not aired, and so they were played on April 19, 1945.  He said in the broadcast: 'I wish with all my heart that everyone fighting in this war and above all those whose duty it is to direct the war from Britain and America could have come with me through the barbed-wire fence that leads to the inner compound of the camp,' he added. 

Outside it had been the lucky prisoners the men and women who had only just arrived at Belsen before we captured it.  But beyond the barrier was a whirling cloud of dust, the dust of thousands of slowly moving people, laden in itself with the deadly typhus germ.  And with the dust was a smell, sickly and thick, the smell of death and decay of corruption and filth.'

Having passed through the barrier and witnessing the 'nightmare' before him, he went on: 'Dead bodies, some of them in decay lay strewn about the road.  And along the rutted tracks on each side of the road were brown wooden huts. There were faces at the windows.  'The bony emaciated faces of starving women too weak to come outside propping themselves against the glass to see the daylight before they died.  And they were dying, every hour and every minute.  I saw a man wandering dazedly along the road then stagger and fall. Someone else looked down at him, took him by the heels and dragged him to the side of the road to join the other bodies lying unburied there.  No one else took the slightest notice, they didn't even trouble to turn their heads.'

One girl, a 'living skeleton', was so thin that it was 'impossible' to determine her age, he said. She pleaded: 'English, English. Medicine, medicine.'

A distraught mother laid her dying baby on the ground at the feet of a British soldier, pleading for some milk.  And the troops themselves were 'moved to cold fury' by the situation they were encountering, Dimbleby said.  He added that the British troops were doing everything they could to save the survivors.  However, more than 10,000 former inmates died in the days and weeks after liberation.  Tragically, some died because their bodies had lost the ability to digest the food that was given to them.  SS guards who had not already fled were put to work picking up decaying bodies and digging burial pits necessary because of the disease threat as they were watched by survivors.  Medical students were sent from Britain to help cope with the shortage of nurses and doctors who were struggling to treat the thousands of inmates that needed care.  With many too weak to survive despite the help they received, it took a month after liberation before the daily death rate fell below 100 for the first time.  British soldier Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Berney was among the first troops in the camp.  He later recalled how there were 'long wooden huts with corpses littering the ground between them.  'In open areas at the rear of the huts, more piles of corpses. At the end of the road, we saw a large open mass grave containing hundreds of corpses.  The sights, the stench, the sheer horror of the place was indescribable.'

Lieutenant-Colonel Berney, who was then just 25 and himself from a Jewish family, became the camp's commander for more than three months.  Fortunately, there was a German barracks nearby with a hospital.  It was upgraded to accommodate an incredible 15,000 patients and became the focus of the efforts to save as many lives as possible.  Lieutenant-Colonel Berney also had to try to repatriate 29,000 Belsen survivors.  After Belsen was cleared, it was burned to the ground by soldiers carrying flame throwers and British Churchill Crocodile tanks.   Anne Frank's final days at Belsen were spent in the camp's sick barracks, where she did her best to care for her sister Margot.  The diarist's last moments are recounted in new book The Many Lives of Anne Frank, by historian Ruth Francis.  Anne, who was 'friendly and sweet' despite being feverish, said to her friends: 'Margot will sleep well and when she sleeps I won't need to get up again.'

Ms Francis adds: 'These are the last words of Anne's that anyone recorded.'

Anne's body was found with her sister's a few days later by her friends, siblings Janny and Lien Brilleslijper.   Janny later recounted: 'She stayed on her feet until Margot died; only then did she give in to her illness.'

The friends wrapped the corpses of Anne and Margot in a blanket and carried them to a mass grave.  Mrs Tribich, who was made an MBE in 2012 for services to education, shares her testimony in schools and colleges across the UK through the Holocaust Educational Trust, which gives tens of thousands of young people every year the unique opportunity to hear the first-hand testimony of Holocaust survivors.  Karen Pollock CBE, chief executive of the Trust, said: 'As we mark this significant anniversary, the lessons of the Holocaust remain as urgent as ever.  With survivors and liberators dwindling in number and with antisemitism continuing to persist in our society we must all commit to remembering the six million Jewish victims and must take action to ensure antisemitism is never again allowed to thrive.'

A new exhibition marking the anniversary of the liberation opened earlier this month at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London.  Among the exhibits in Traces of Belsen is a pamphlet that was published by the Daily Mail in 1945.  The document, titled 'Lest We forget: The Horrors of Nazi Concentration Camps Revealed for All Time in the Most Terrible Photographs Ever Published', was distributed around the country.   It includes some of the best-known photos documenting the atrocities uncovered at Belsen and other camps, including Buchenwald, which was liberated on April 11.  Also in the pamphlet were a series of articles that laid out in extensive detail the horrifying conditions and the crimes perpetrated by the Nazis at the camps.  The exhibition also reveals the lesser-known stories of Belsen, including how it was the site of the murder of 50,000 Soviet prisoners of war.  And it recounts how, after liberation, Belsen became a displaced persons camp and was the focus of the renewal of Jewish cultural and civic life.  Dr Toby Simpson, the Director of the Wiener Holocaust Library, said: 'Traces of Belsen takes a fresh look at a subject that many of us think we are familiar with, because of the images of overwhelming death and suffering that were broadcast to the world in April 1945.  The more we look at the evidence that remains, however, the more we can see that the catastrophic conditions in Belsen during the last months of the war, which so appalled the camps liberators and the wider world, produced shocking impressions which tend to obscure as much as they reveal.'

Belated Happy Birthday ethil6!