Richard Dimbleby’s BBC broadcast from Bergen-Belsen on 19 April 1945, four days after the camp’s liberation by British forces, was the first detailed eyewitness radio report on a Nazi concentration camp delivered to the British public by a British correspondent. The broadcast ran for fourteen minutes. Dimbleby had walked through the camp with the British medical units that had arrived to begin the relief operation. The recording is one of the central documents of British Holocaust memory.
The broadcast
Dimbleby was thirty-one years old and the senior BBC war correspondent attached to British forces in northern Germany. He arrived at Bergen-Belsen with a recording engineer and a wax-disc field recorder on the morning of 19 April 1945, four days after the camp had been handed over to the British 11th Armoured Division by the German commandant on 15 April under a local truce. The conditions he found were the conditions the camp was in: around 60,000 prisoners in the camp, around 13,000 unburied corpses on the ground, typhus epidemic at full extent, daily death rates still in the high hundreds despite the arrival of British medical personnel.
The recording Dimbleby made was substantially longer than the broadcast version that was eventually transmitted. The full recording ran for around forty minutes; the BBC News editors at Broadcasting House, on receiving the discs in London, refused initially to broadcast any of it on the grounds that the material was too distressing for a public radio audience and that the substance of what Dimbleby was reporting was too unprecedented to credit without further corroboration. Dimbleby threatened to resign if the recording was not broadcast. After three days of argument the BBC broadcast a fourteen-minute edited version on the BBC Home Service evening news on the night of 19 April 1945.
The text
The broadcast description is the closest the British public came to a contemporaneous eyewitness account of the camps. Three of the most-quoted passages:
I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was “English, English, medicine, medicine,” and she was trying to cry but had not enough strength.
This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.
I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men who opened the Belsen camp this week, and those of the police and the RAMC who are now on duty there.
The complete recording survived in the BBC archive and was published in full in 1995 on the fiftieth anniversary of the liberation. The unedited version is substantially longer and includes material that the 1945 BBC editors had cut on grounds of broadcastability.
The reception
The broadcast had a substantial and documented impact on British public understanding of what the camps had been. The BBC received approximately 4,000 letters in the week after the broadcast, the largest single response to a war report the corporation had received during the war. The Picture Post photographic essay on Belsen of 5 May 1945, which carried the photographs of Sergeant William Lawrie and other British military photographers, was substantially shaped in editorial framing by the Dimbleby broadcast. The 1945 newsreel The True Glory used Dimbleby’s recorded narration in places.
The broader historiographical question of what the British public had been told about the camps before the liberation, and how the public response to the liberation footage and the Dimbleby broadcast bears on that question, is treated on the dedicated What the Allies Knew and When page. The short version is that substantial information about the camps had been available in the British press from 1942 onwards but had not been pressed into the public consciousness in a form that survived contact with the everyday demands of the war effort. The April 1945 footage and the Dimbleby broadcast were the moment at which the abstract knowledge became unavoidable.
Afterwards
Dimbleby continued as the senior BBC correspondent through the late 1940s, the 1950s and the early 1960s, becoming one of the principal voices of British post-war broadcasting. He returned to Belsen on assignment in 1955 and again in 1965 for BBC anniversary documentaries. He died of cancer in 1965 at the age of fifty-two. His son David Dimbleby continued the family’s broadcasting career into the twenty-first century. The Belsen recording is preserved in the BBC Sound Archive and is available in full on the BBC website.
See also
- What the Allies Knew and When
- The British Dimension
- Churchill and the Holocaust
- Bergen-Belsen and the British Response
- Imperial War Museum Holocaust Galleries
- The Wiener Holocaust Library London
Sources
- Jonathan Dimbleby, Richard Dimbleby: A Biography, Hodder and Stoughton, 1975
- Leonard Miall, Inside the BBC: British Broadcasting Characters, Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1994 (chapter on Dimbleby and Belsen)
- Toby Haggith, “The Filming of the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen and Its Impact on the Understanding of the Holocaust”, in Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (eds), Holocaust and the Moving Image, Wallflower Press, 2005
- Mark Celinscak, Distance from the Belsen Heap: Allied Forces and the Liberation of a Concentration Camp, University of Toronto Press, 2015
- Ben Shephard, After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen 1945, Jonathan Cape, 2005
- BBC Sound Archive, “Richard Dimbleby’s Bergen-Belsen broadcast”, 19 April 1945, full recording released 1995, https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive
- Imperial War Museum, photographic and film record of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, https://www.iwm.org.uk