Bergen-Belsen Was a Humanitarian Disaster Not Murder

The disaster at Bergen-Belsen in spring 1945 was real. The collapse of supply, the typhus epidemic, the starvation and the unburied dead were not invented for the cameras. They were also not unforeseen consequences of forces beyond the SS’s control. The SS had taken specific decisions over the preceding eight months to convert Bergen-Belsen from a small holding camp into a destination for evacuation transports, knowing that the camp’s infrastructure could not support the resulting population, and that the resulting deaths would run into the tens of thousands. The disaster was a foreseeable and foreseen consequence of the SS’s decisions. Calling it a humanitarian disaster does not exonerate the people who arranged it.

What Bergen-Belsen was

Bergen-Belsen, in Lower Saxony, opened in April 1943 as a small SS facility (Aufenthaltslager) intended to hold Jews considered useful for prisoner-exchange negotiations: holders of foreign citizenship, holders of Latin American papers (genuine or forged), and prominent Jews whose disappearance might have diplomatic consequences. The camp was designed for approximately 10,000 inmates and was, until summer 1944, run as a prisoner-exchange facility with conditions less severe than the killing-and-labour camps further east. It was not part of the WVHA’s main labour-camp network and not part of the Operation Reinhard killing system.

The character of the camp changed in the second half of 1944. As the Soviet advance approached the eastern killing facilities, the SS began evacuating Auschwitz, Stutthof, Mittelbau-Dora and the various eastern labour camps westward. Some of the evacuees were sent to Bergen-Belsen. The camp’s population grew from approximately 7,300 in July 1944 to approximately 15,000 in December 1944 to approximately 41,000 in March 1945 to approximately 60,000 by mid-April 1945. Across the same period, the camp’s food, water, sanitation and medical infrastructure remained at its original 10,000-person specification. The SS made no significant additional provisions to feed, house or treat the new arrivals. The camp commandant Josef Kramer (transferred from Auschwitz in December 1944) wrote repeated requests to higher authority for additional supplies; the requests were ignored or partially declined.

The collapse

The result was the collapse the photographs document. Typhus broke out in late 1944 and spread through the overcrowded barracks; with no isolation facilities, no medication and no clean water, the death rate climbed week by week. By February 1945 approximately 10,000 prisoners were dying per month. By March 1945 the figure was over 18,000. The bodies were not being buried because there was no labour available to bury them and no fuel for cremation; they accumulated in the open between the barracks. The food supply collapsed because the daily ration delivery had been reduced as the German rail network failed and the SS made no alternative arrangements. By early April 1945 there was effectively no food being distributed; the prisoners were eating grass, leaves, and (in some documented cases) the dead.

The British 11th Armoured Division entered the camp on 15 April 1945 under a local truce arranged by the SS commandant. They found approximately 13,000 unburied corpses and approximately 60,000 living prisoners in conditions that the British medical officer Brigadier Glyn Hughes described in his after-action report as “without parallel in human experience”. Despite the rapid Allied response, approximately a further 14,000 prisoners died in the weeks after liberation, mostly of the typhus and intestinal infections that had taken hold before liberation and that the available medical capacity could not arrest in time.

What the SS knew

The SS administrative records (those of the WVHA and of Bergen-Belsen itself, partially captured by the British) document that the SS knew what was happening. Kramer’s reports to Berlin in February and March 1945 describe the rising mortality, the ration collapse, and the typhus epidemic in detail. The SS did not lack information; the SS chose not to act on the information. The decision to keep adding prisoners to a camp whose capacity had been exceeded fivefold, while reducing the food supply to the same camp, was a decision. The decision was taken by people whose names are on the surviving correspondence.

The trial of Kramer and forty-four other Bergen-Belsen personnel by the British Military Court at Lüneburg in September to November 1945 established the operational responsibility in detail. Eleven defendants including Kramer were sentenced to death and hanged on 13 December 1945. The court did not accept the “humanitarian disaster” framing; it found, on the documentary evidence, that the SS personnel had been individually responsible for specific decisions and acts that had caused specific deaths. The framing the deniers now use, that the disaster was beyond anyone’s control, was the defence Kramer and his co-defendants offered at the time. It was rejected by the court that examined the evidence at first hand.

The wider context

Bergen-Belsen in spring 1945 was the visible end-stage of an operation that had killed millions of people elsewhere over the preceding three years. The argument that the camp’s conditions were a humanitarian disaster rather than a crime depends on isolating Bergen-Belsen from the system that fed it. The prisoners arriving at Bergen-Belsen in winter 1944 to 1945 had come from Auschwitz, where most of their family members had been killed in the gas chambers; from Stutthof, where the killing operation by gas had been running for months; from the various Mittelbau-Dora and Buchenwald satellite camps where the working-to-death regime had been in operation. They were the survivors of a system whose final stage was the slow death the British found at Belsen. The system had been arranged by the SS, in detail, with documents, over years. It was not a humanitarian disaster. It was the design.

Why the claim is harmful

The claim is harmful because it presents the visible end-stage of the operation as the entirety of it, and presents that end-stage as if it had no human cause. The SS had built the camp, decided to fill it beyond capacity, decided not to provision the additional population, and decided to allow the resulting deaths. The British court that tried the camp’s senior personnel rejected the framing the deniers now revive. To accept the claim, one would have to dismiss the surviving SS correspondence, the Bergen-Belsen Trial findings, the contemporaneous medical reports, and the simple chronology of what the SS had been doing to the prisoners over the preceding three years before they reached Bergen-Belsen.

Who decided to send the evacuation transports to Bergen-Belsen? Who decided not to increase the food supply? Who was found responsible for the conditions, and on what evidence?

See also

• The Mittelwerk and Dora Camp
• The Stutthof and Baltic Marches

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Sources

• Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, Routledge, 1998, the standard scholarly study
• Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany 1945 to 1950, Wayne State University Press, 2002
• Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, contemporaneous medical reports on Bergen-Belsen, April to May 1945, Imperial War Museum and Wellcome Library
• The Trial of Josef Kramer and 44 Others (The Belsen Trial), Lüneburg, September to November 1945, full transcript published as The Belsen Trial, edited by Raymond Phillips, William Hodge, 1949 (Notable British Trials series)
• Ben Flanagan and Donald Bloxham (eds.), Remembering Belsen: Eyewitnesses Record the Liberation, Vallentine Mitchell, 2005
• Bernd Naumann, The Belsen Trial, in Auschwitz series, Praeger, 1966
• Karin Orth, Das System der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager, Hamburger Edition, 1999, with the SS administrative record on the camp’s expansion
• Eberhard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen: Vom “Aufenthaltslager” zum Konzentrationslager 1943 bis 1945, Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1985
• Imperial War Museum, Department of Documents, Bergen-Belsen Liberation Collection, with eyewitness accounts by British military personnel
• Anne Frank House, on the deaths of Anne and Margot Frank at Bergen-Belsen, https://www.annefrank.org
• USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia, “Bergen-Belsen”, https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org