Michalczyk, John J. "The British Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: Memory of the Camps (1945/1985)." Filming the End of the Holocaust: Allied Documentaries, Nuremberg and the Liberation of the Concentration Camps. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014. 31–46. Bloomsbury Collections. Web. 27 Sep. 2021. <http://dx.doi.org/10.5040/9781474210652.ch-003>. Downloaded from Bloomsbury Collections, www.bloomsburycollections.com, 27 September 2021, 11:09 UTC. Copyright © John J. Michalczyk 2014. You may share this work for non-commercial purposes only, provided you give attribution to the copyright holder and the publisher, and provide a link to the Creative Commons licence. 3 Th e British Liberation of Bergen-Belsen: Memory of the Camps (1945/1985) On the same day that General George Patton wrote to General Dwight D. Eisenhower about his profound experiences at Ohrdruf on April 15, 1945, further north in Germany above Hanover in Saxony, the Allied 21st Army Group, a combined British-Canadian unit, marched into an area called Belsen. 1 It was a sunny day. Spring was in the air. Th e soldiers saw cows in the fi elds, charming orchards, and a mother and her children. All seemed very pastoral and tranquil . until the soldiers smelled a horrifi c stench lingering in the air. As they advanced further into the area, they came upon a concentration camp; the sight of the contents of the camp defi ed the human imagination. It could have been a scene from Dante’s Inferno or from Hieronymus Bosch’s graphic paintings of Hell or Th e Last Judgment . When the British troops entered the site, revulsion swept through the ranks of the liberators. Th ey soon came to understand that the camp was a fi nal attempt by the Nazis to relocate their prisoners from camps as far away in Poland as Auschwitz and Majdanek to this camp in Germany. Th e Russians in the meantime were fi ghting their way toward Germany, and closing in on Berlin, the heart of the Reich, which would soon be the fi nal resting place of Fascism. Th e Nazis forced- march the prisoners near the Russian front lines to German camps like Bergen-Belsen for the most part. Th e Bergen-Belsen camp had passed through a number of stages, from a prisoner of war Stalag to a camp with a complex mixture of Jews, Roma (Gypsies), political prisoners, Jehovah’s Witnesses, criminals, and homosexuals. Prior to the Allies’ liberation of the camp, the population had risen to 60,000. With the exodus from Poland, however, came prisoners with typhus and other lethal diseases which infected the prisoners already located in the camp. Th e epidemic swept like wildfi re through the camp, killing thousands of inmates already ravaged from hunger, tuberculosis, and dysentery. As the British army unit arrived at the gates, the corpses lay strewn on the ground in front of the barracks. Th e task ahead of the soldiers, separating the living from the dead, demanded extreme eff ort. Robert H. 31 32 Filming the End of the Holocaust Abzug describes this mammoth undertaking in his study of the liberation of the camps, Inside the Vicious Heart : Awestruck by the awful challenge that faced them, British offi cers began clean- up and rehabilitation. Mass graves started by the Germans were fi lled and new ones dug. Distribution of food and water and medical aid to the forty or more thousand living souls began. But even so, day aft er day hundreds died from the raging typhus epidemic. It is estimated that, despite the best eff orts of the British to feed and treat the inmates, some 28,000 died aft er the liberation. 2 On that day when the British and Canadian soldiers set foot into the Bergen- Belsen camp, a British journalist, Richard Dimbleby, accompanied them, one of the fi rst to be an eyewitness to the atrocities committed there on a massive scale. Dimbleby recorded what he gazed at with horror on April 15, 1945. 3 One image that haunted him was that of a mother with a child who confronted a British soldier. He described the situation of a frantic woman screaming at the sentry to give her milk for her baby, thrusting the child into his arms and running off crying terribly. “When he opened the bundle, he found that the baby had been dead for days. Th is day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.” 4 Dimbleby broke down crying several times in his attempt to complete the radio report. Th e BBC delayed broadcasting his eyewitness testimony of Nazi barbarity until several days later because the staff could not believe its veracity. 5 Th e public had never heard of such devastating treatment of human beings either. Th en other reports came through, verifying the ghastly accounts of inhuman treatment of the prisoners. “One of the British senior medical offi cers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn-Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. Th ere were bodies with no fl esh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed.” 6 British citizens could not believe their ears as they listened to the BBC broadcast. Among the well- known prisoners rescued at Bergen-Belsen was the future Member of the European Parliament and French Minister of Health under Jacques Chirac and Raymond Barre, Simone Veil, who lost many of the members of her family during the Holocaust. She had earlier made the march in the transfer of prisoners from Auschwitz. Unfortunately, Anne Frank and her sister Margot were not as fortunate as Veil, having died of typhus in March, just prior to the liberation of the camp. Th e corpses of the victims of the disease numbered too many to off er a respectful burial, so bulldozers plowed them into mass pits, a horrifi c scene viewed at the close of Alain Resnais’ documentary Nuit et brouillard ( Night and Fog , 1955) and later screened and discussed at the 1961 Eichmann Trial in Jerusalem. Th e British Liberation of Bergen-Belsen 33 Memory of the Camps : Production history Th e history of this very graphic fi lm that lay dormant in the British archives for four decades dates back to February 8, 1945. President Roosevelt and other Allied leaders were seeking justice for the war criminals as reports began to trickle in about Nazi atrocities. Less than two weeks earlier, the Russians liberated Auschwitz and the Red Army cameramen a short time later documented the scene they encountered. In 1945, Sergei Nolbandov, a Russian- born writer, producer and director of a celebrated British war fi lm ( Ships with Wings , 1941), was working with the British Ministry of Information fi lm division. On February 8, he sent a note to Sidney Bernstein, Chief of the Film Section of the Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF. Nolbandov’s memo indicates that the footage of the atrocities in various camps was extensive, “And this material, it emerges, was being collected with a view to preparing a fi lm which will show the German atrocities in many parts of the world.”7 Bernstein understood the importance of the message and began acting on it. He had a serious objective in mind: “[Th e fi lm] should be in the form of a Prosecuting counsel stating his case. It is of extreme importance that German audiences see the faces of the individual directly responsible. Eff orts should be made to secure the names and personal background of all persons thus shown, attempting to establish that they were once ordinary people.” 8 Bernstein, son of Jewish parents from the East End of London, had arrived in Europe on one of the fi rst D-Day landing craft s. Making his way through Nazi- occupied areas of France and Belgium, he arrived in Bergen-Belsen a day aft er the troops liberated it in April 1945. Although Bernstein was just passing through with his unit, the vision of the corpses and walking skeletons haunted him throughout his life. Given his Jewish upbringing, he was able to converse with some of the prisoners in Yiddish. Based on his experience at the camp, shortly aft erwards he prepared a nine- page document entitled “Material Needed for Proposed Motion Picture on German Atrocities.” Th e jointly sponsored fi lm of the Allies was to have three audiences—German citizens, German prisoners of war, and citizens of diverse liberated or occupied countries. Th e rationale of the Allies in the production of this documentary, as with other fi lms and newsreels, was to alert various audiences to the horror infl icted on innocent Europeans at the hands of the Nazi perpetrators. Justice would be served, and the Allies wished to reinforce this notion with strong, visual images. Th e Psychological Warfare Department determined to create a legal case against the perpetrators and make certain that this cinematic documentation would prevent Nazis from disproving their criminal actions or minimizing them. As the Russians moved closer to 34 Filming the End of the Holocaust Berlin, the Nazis were already attempting to eradicate traces of their criminal activity by destroying as much evidence as possible. Th is can be seen in their demolition of the crematorium at Auschwitz-Birkenau in November 1944, viewed at the close of Night and Fog , and in some of the fi nal scenes of Costa- Gavras’ Amen . (2000) where German soldiers burn corpses in the woods in a surrealistic atmosphere. Th e project had ambitious goals, but cooperation between the US OWI and the US Signal Corps with the British Psychological War Department would result in very dramatic results, with the massive amount of footage fi lmed at the liberation of the camps.