During the last months of the war the situation for the Germans was dire. They had fought desperately to maintain cohesion and hold their positions in battles that often saw thousands perish. By the early spring of 1945 their overstretched and undermanned armies were fighting on German soil both on the eastern and western fronts, against the overwhelming strength of the enemy. To make matters worse troop units were no longer being refitted with replacements to compensate for the large losses sustained. Most soldiers were all too aware that they were in the final stages of the war.
By this period of the war many of the concentration camps and death camps had already fallen into enemy hands. In those camps not yet captured there was unease and deep concern amongst the guards. Some struggled psychologically with the daily duties of murder and many stayed on as obedient subordinates, driven perhaps by the ‘banality of evil’. At Belsen, the majority of the SS were not ideologically motivated, nor were they Nazi fanatics perverted by torture and death. The job to them was simply a way for them to survive in the realms of the SS order, however evil their task was.
Even as the war neared its end in April 1945, both the female and male guards continued upholding their mission to eliminate Nazi-designated sub-humanity from the face of the earth. But despite the pending collapse of the Third Reich, the majority of the women guards did not attempt to prepare themselves for the inevitable post war retribution. Even as the audible sounds of enemy gun fire became louder with each passing day, most of the women, unlike their male counterparts, never tried to gain favour with the inmates by treating them better, even when it was clear to them that Germany would lose the war. With the advance of British forces into the area, the female guards remained at their posts.
The advance units of the British Second Army that liberated Bergen-Belsen on the 15 April were not psychologically prepared for what they encountered when they arrived at the gates of the camp that day. British soldiers were numbed and nauseated by what they saw, smelled, and heard. They were also amazed when they approached the main gate in a motorised column: they found that the SS personnel, as if preparing for a formal reception, were drawn up in their field grey uniforms. The SS guards appeared cheerful. Josef Kramer for instance seemed unusually outgoing, friendly, and pleasant. Yet behind them were 10,000 unburied dead, in addition to mass graves which already contained 40,000 more corpses. At that time as many as 500 a day were perishing from the long-term effects of starvation and the resultant diseases. Yet he appeared more concerned that the British would use their loudspeakers, fearing it might cause the inmates to stampede. Then, as the British moved further into the camp, the sound of periodic small arms fire could be heard: SS guards were firing on inmates surging towards the kitchen in the hope of finding something to eat. Irma Grese attacked a British General as he was attempting to enter some huts, but she was immediately restrained. After many of the SS personnel were taken into custody, Kramer spoke of the starving masses as if he were referring to cattle.
When the British came upon the women guards’ compound, the troops were confronted by a formation of well-fed, overweight, female guards who were said to be casually standing around chatting and smoking cigarettes waiting for their conquerors. One soldier recalled that many of the women had contorted, ugly facial expressions and all wore either hobnailed jack boots or military issue dress shoes with black socks.
Once the SS women were arrested, they joined the men on burial details. All of them had the gruesome task of dragging corpses to the pits. The soldiers noticed that the majority of the women reacted differently to this ghastly work than the men did. While some of the men ran away from the ordeal and one committed suicide, none of the women attempted to avoid it.
Walking around the camp, British troops were numbed by the appalling condition of the inmates. Lieutenant-Colonel R.I.G. Taylor, the Commanding Officer of the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, recalled his impressions of the camp at liberation:
A great number of them [the inmates] were little more than living skeletons with haggard yellowish faces. Most of the men wore a striped pyjama type of clothing others wore rags, while women wore striped flannel gowns or any other clothing they had managed to acquire. Many of them were without shoes and wore only socks and stockings. There were men and women lying in heaps on both sides of the track. Others were walking slowly and aimlessly about – a vacant expression on their starved faces.
The British found 40,000 prisoners still alive at the time of the camp’s liberation and almost immediately commenced efforts to save the sick and starving. The Deputy Director of Medical Services for the British Second Army, Brigadier H.L. Glyn-Hughes, was to oversee the mammoth task of aiding and feeding them and preventing the spread of infectious diseases.
To further help the relief effort the British allowed the Hungarians to remain in charge and only commandant Kramer was arrested. However, some of the Hungarian guards with their SS counterparts murdered some of the starving prisoners who attempted to get into the store houses. As a result of this the British supervised and guarded the food supplies and started to provide direct emergency medical care, clothing and food. The water supply too was reestablished after departing German soldiers had sabotaged the water supply in the barracks.
While many of the inmates were too sick or weak to do anything but lay down in their own filth, there were some stronger prisoners that were capable of undertaking revenge killings. This was particularly the case in the satellite camp known as the Hohne-Camp. Some 15,000 prisoners from Mittelbau-Dora had been marched under horrendous conditions and relocated there in early April. Mittelbau-Dora had been a sub-camp of Buchenwald concentration camp. Its prisoners had been worked to death by the SS mainly in the tunnel excavation situated near Nordhausen, where the V-2 rocket and the flying bomb V-1 rocket were produced. Life for the inmates there was terrible. Summary executions, deliberately being starved, and extreme cruelty were quite normal occurrences there. However, with the advancing Allied forces approaching Dora, the SS murdered those too sick to be marched, and those strong enough were put on a death march to the Hohne-Camp. While the SS continued to beat, starve and murder them in their new camp, many of the inmates were in much better physical condition than those in the main Belsen camp. After its liberation on 15 April 1945 some of the stronger prisoners turned on those who had been their overseers at Mittelbau. Some 170 of these Kapos were murdered in revenge killings.
Elsewhere in the camp, the surviving prisoners were fed slowly and given water. A delousing station was erected, and once deloused the recovering inmates were moved to a nearby German Panzer army camp, which became the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. For the next month, thousands of survivors were moved to the Panzer army camp.
In the meantime, while the living were being kept alive, the dead were being planned for mass burial in huge pits. Though most of the documents and administrative files were destroyed by the SS before the handover of the camp, the British were determined not only to film and photograph what they witnessed as evidence of what the Germans had done, but were determined to force the remaining SS personnel under armed guard to bury the dead in pits. Burying the dead was an insult to the SS and their female counterparts, but it was a way of degrading them for their heinous crimes, and making them in some way accountable for their actions.
As the dead were being buried the typhus epidemic and louse infestation continued to spread through Belsen at an alarming rate, causing more deaths. As a result of this the British drew up plans to burn the camp once everyone had been moved to the Hohne-Camp. Over a period of a month some 29,000 people were moved into the new camp. British troops then moved flame-throwing Bren gun carriers and Churchill Crocodile tanks into Belsen and burned the camp to the ground.
In spite the efforts of the British to help the remaining survivors with food and medical aid, a further 14,000 people died between the time of the liberation in April and the end of June 1945.
As for the perpetrators of the crimes of Belsen – Josef Kramer, Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann – all finally received retribution for their deeds. But following their ‘Belsen Trial’ in November 1945 they had gone to the gallows never regretting their heinous crimes against humanity. Ultimately their only regret as they walked to the gallows was that the Fatherland had lost the war. In their minds, they had acted in accordance with orders and had done their job to the best of their ability. During their murderous career they had sent thousands of people to their deaths. Yet, they never really thought that what they had done was wrong. Contrary to popular belief, most of the guards did not have a robot-like obedience that accounted for their ability to commit so many inhumane acts. Neither were they were natural born killers, but over time killers is what they learnt and chose to become.
As concentration camp guards they generally performed their work with enthusiasm and took pride in their achievements. Like so many other guards these people were able to bury their emotions and their natural revulsion at committing atrocities because the Jews were regarded as ‘the enemy’ and had no intrinsic right to life. Unravelling the complex motivation of people like Kramer or Grese lies not in the person, but the ideas that possessed them. Their willingness to subject people to physical suffering because they had been ordered to do so has long been dismissed as a valid legal defence. At places like Belsen they were educated in death and brutality, which they themselves put into practice. They had chosen to put what they had learned into operation, with devastating results. They were undoubtedly willing accomplices to murdering huge numbers of innocent men, women and children.