CHAPTER TWO

The Western Allies

‘Buchenwald was a fact that will stink through the years of history, and if we ever forget it then God help mankind because we shall then have sunk to a level as low as that of the men who made this camp – which is lower than mankind should be and stay alive.’

PERCY KNAUTH

‘I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally to the Allies. It was a suitable place to be. For surely this war was made to abolish Dachau and all the other places like Dachau and everything that Dachau stands for. To abolish it forever. That these cemetery prisons existed is the crime and shame of the German people.’

MARTHA GELLHORN1

On 23 November 1944, French troops entered the Natzweiler-Struthof camp in Alsace. High up in the Vosges mountains, the beauty of its setting contrasts with what transpired there. Evidence of torture and murder was clear, and the French also found a small gas chamber, where eighty-six Jews from Auschwitz had been sent to be killed, in order that their bodies could be used for anatomical research by Professor August Hirt at the ‘Reich University’ in occupied Strasbourg.² Yet perhaps because it was the only such site of horror that the Western Allies had uncovered at that point, even many of those who actually saw the camp, such as American reporters and soldiers, were unable to make sense of what they had seen; some even dismissed it as aberrant or unimportant within the larger context of winning the war. Unlike the Soviet photographers who had been documenting atrocities in the Soviet Union for three years by the time they reached Majdanek, American and British photographers ‘had little professional or personal experience with Nazi atrocities’.3 Although the persecution of German political enemies, Jews and the citizens of occupied nations, especially Slavs, had been well documented since the inception of the Nazi regime, and even though Allied governments had been issuing statements condemning the murder of the Jews from 1942, there seems to have been a widespread inability to transform such knowledge into belief or a conscious acceptance of what such knowledge really meant.⁴ Only once it became clear, in April 1945, that Natzweiler was neither an aberration nor even the most awful of the camps, did the people of Western Europe and the US start to get to grips with what the Nazis had done. As the celebrated photographer Margaret Bourke-White said, ‘If we had encountered just one camp run by a maniac, we would have considered it merely the work of madness. But at a certain stage in the advance of our armies we began meeting these camps everywhere.’⁵

The change in perception began on 4 April 1945 when US troops arrived at Ohrdruf, a sub-camp of Buchenwald, not far from Weimar. There was no one alive there. The SS guards had marched 9,000 of its inmates to Buchenwald; the other 4,000, too ill to walk, they had killed or left for dead. When the American soldiers arrived they were confronted by bodies 'piled everywhere, making passage impossible’. For the first time, American liberating soldiers had some sense of what a Nazi camp was like:

I was totally unprepared for what we found in Ohrdruf. I had heard of concentration camps, of course, but until the moment when we entered Ohrdruf and found the bodies strewn all about, I imagined them to be giant work camps employing slave labour – three meals a day and a bed at night in exchange for unpaid labour.⁶

The fact that General Eisenhower, the Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe, visited the camp on 12 April, and testified to what his troops had uncovered there, undoubtedly helped to overcome the widespread sense of suspicion about ‘atrocity stories’, a suspicion that was a legacy of the First World War.7 Eisenhower instructed American troops in the area to visit Ohrdruf with the words, ‘We are told that the American soldier does not know what he is fighting for. Now, at least, he will know what he is fighting against.’ And he cabled London and Washington, imploring politicians and journalists to take seriously the reports from Germany: ‘We are constantly finding German camps in which they have placed political prisoners where unspeakable conditions exist. From my own personal observation, I can state unequivocally that all written statements up to now do not paint the full horrors.’⁸

The day after they entered Ohrdruf, the Americans arrived at Dora-Nordhausen in the Harz mountains, where slave labourers worked on the production of V2 rockets in underground factories. About fifteen miles before the camp, one of the Americans later recalled, ‘it hung in the air. I cannot describe it. It was just a penetrating odour … we later found out this was the odour from the camp itself.’⁹ As well as another 2,700 unburied corpses, at Nordhausen the Americans also found some 3,000 survivors. And so began the process of initial shock followed by the herculean effort to care for the living, often, at least at first, with absurdly inadequate supplies. Within days Western Allied troops had liberated Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, and, in May, Mauthausen and its sub-camps, including Ebensee and Gusen, and Neuengamme and its sub-camps. Canadian troops later liberated transit camp Westerbork in the Netherlands. These are just some of the best-known camps, of which (when one includes sub-camps) there were hundreds.

The camps liberated by the Western Allies are far better documented than those liberated by the Soviets in terms of official documents, reports and survivor testimonies – largely a result of the vastly greater numbers of people involved. One sees the sense of bewilderment and shock, and not only joy, that prevailed at the moment of liberation just as clearly in these cases as in those of the liberation of Majdanek or Auschwitz. One man, Baruch Gewürtz, who claimed to have been forced to gas people at a death camp near Riga, exclaimed to Percy Knauth in Buchenwald: ‘They have cursed me with the memory of all those dead, and even if I get out of Buchenwald now, I'll never feel free!’¹⁰ Zalman Grinberg, a doctor and former inhabitant of the Kovno ghetto, appointed by the Americans to run a hospital for Jewish survivors at St Ottilien, could say in a speech marking a month since the liberation of Kaufering (a large network of sub-camps of Dachau): ‘We have met here today to celebrate our liberation, but it is a day of mourning as well. We are free, but we do not understand our freedom, probably because we are still in the shadow of the dead.’11

When dealing with the camps liberated by the Western Allies (what I call here for convenience ‘western camps') it is crucial to remember that the chaos in them as the Americans, Canadians or British arrived was in no small measure a result of the death marches that had brought inmates of eastern camps to the western half of the Reich. The distinction between ‘eastern’ and ‘western’ camps is thus something of a false one since, particularly amongst the Jewish survivors of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen, most had been in the ‘eastern’ camps until the months and weeks before the liberating troops arrived. Nevertheless, from the point of view of survivors’ post-liberation treatment, being liberated by the Red Army or by the Western Allies did make a difference, as we will see.

One of the first crucial points of distinction was the Western Allies’ initial inability to understand the difference between the camps they had liberated and those freed by the Soviets. First, the Western Allies distrusted the reports in Pravda and other Soviet outlets. With the exception of the Illustrated London News, which reported on Majdanek on 14 October 1944 with the expressed aim of proving that reports of Nazi crimes were not exaggerated, the British press only mentioned Soviet reports of Auschwitz or Majdanek with a tone of disbelief.¹² When the Daily Mail reported on Majdanek on 4 September 1944, it did so in a short piece which reported how Lieutenant-General Milmar Moser, commander of German forces in Lublin, had written to the Red Army (by whom he was being held captive) to announce: ‘I consider it my duty to tell the whole truth about the extermination camp built by the Nazis near Lublin.’ But the paper placed ‘extermination camp’ in inverted commas, thus implicitly questioning the term, and the whole article played into a popular distinction between the ‘clean’ Wehrmacht and the evil SS.¹³ The BBC refused to use a report sent to them from Majdanek by journalist Alexander Werth, thinking it was ‘a Russian propaganda stunt’ and, as Werth rightly says, ‘it was not till the discovery in the west of Buchenwald, Dachau and Belsen that they were convinced that Maidanek and Auschwitz were also genuine’.¹⁴

By contrast, Belsen, Dachau and Buchenwald were all described in the Western press as the worst of the Nazi camps, although none were extermination centres. In Britain, Belsen came to emblematise the Nazi camps as a whole, just as Buchenwald did in the US.15 CBS reporter Edward R. Murrow's famous report from Buchenwald was entitled ‘They died 900 a Day in “the Best” Nazi Death Camp.’¹⁶ Furthermore, just as until the end of the war there was a reluctance among the politicians and populations of the UK and the US to believe ‘atrocity stories’, so now press reports wrote of victims in terms of national groups, people who had suffered as the Nazis had invaded their countries; as a consequence, the specific nature of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews disappeared.¹⁷ These responses were neither entirely surprising nor, when seen in historical context, especially reprehensible. All those involved in the liberation of the camps, whether soldiers, relief workers, military chaplains or journalists, testified to the incomprehensibility of what they were seeing, and so if they at first failed to grasp that many of the people they encountered were Jews who had been transferred from the east that was an understandable mistake. It was a miscomprehension that would have important ramifications, however, as the liberated camps became DP communities and as the Allies had to develop policies for dealing with survivors who, in due course, would be termed ‘non-repatriable’. Besides, before the war there had been many attempts to alert the British and American public to the particular animosity held by the Nazis towards the Jews, and afterwards it was known that Jews were among the victims.¹⁸

Sometimes the same people who had reported during the war on rumours that the Nazis were murdering the Jews, such as the New York Times’ Milton Bracker, were unable to connect those reports with what they now saw at the war's end – in Bracker's case, at Natzweiler, which he dubbed ‘the Lublin of Alsace’.¹⁹ The problem was that in the immediate aftermath of the war, with millions of people on the march across Europe, it seemed invidious (and, for the British, somehow distasteful, as if one were perpetuating a ‘Nazi way of thinking') to point to the Jews specifically as a victim group, especially as the absolute numbers of surviving Jews were small by comparison with the millions of forced labourers and refugees on the march across Europe. Occasionally the attempt was made, as with Chief Rabbi J.H. Hertz's letter of 28 May 1945 to The Times:

His Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury in his stirring letter to his diocese, as well as the writer of the obituary notice on Himmler, both in The Times of to-day, refer to the horrors of the concentration camps. But there are Nazi horrors far vaster and more unspeakably foul, and these have not been effectively brought home to the larger British public. It is therefore not generally known that the Nazis have exterminated 5,000,000 Jews – and millions of non-Jews in monster crematory and asphyxiation halls, by machine-gunning, clubbing to death, and mass drownings. On one single day, November 3, 1943, at Maidanek, the central human slaughter-house in Poland, 18,000 Jews were done to death, accompanied by the music of bands playing tango-marches in mockery of the agony of the victims.20

Indeed, even the liberators did their best to make this point clear, as Derrick Sington explained:

By the end of our second day in Belsen we had been able to find out the nationality groups in the camp. About 25,000 out of the 40,000 inmates were women, and of these some 18,000 were Hungarian, Polish, Rumanian, Czech and German Jewesses. They were a large part of the survivors of European Jewry, hastily piled into Belsen as the advance of the Allied armies from East and West forced the Germans to evacuate the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland and the scores of slave-labour camps in Silesia and North East Germany. The greater part of these Jewish women were sole survivors of families who had perished in the gas chambers of Birkenau and Treblinka.²¹

But for the most part, the genocide of the Jews was subsumed into larger, familiar and more palatable narratives of national suffering during warfare. One consequence of this way of thinking was that those found at camps were segregated and housed along national lines, with the result that Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were sometimes housed together with former Nazis and anti-Semitic collaborators. The liberators and the liberated therefore often had very different understandings of what was going on, if they could conceptualise it at all.

The Liberators

The first liberated camp still to contain a sizeable number of inmates was Buchenwald, near Weimar. Established in 1937 as a concentration camp for political prisoners, by early 1945 it was massively overcrowded with survivors of the Holocaust and other prisoners who had arrived on forced marches. A week before the Americans arrived there were about 44,000 inmates in the camp, but the Nazis transferred 23,000 of them by train to Theresienstadt, Flossenbürg and Dachau. Of the trains sent to Dachau, several were liberated en route and one only arrived at the camp near Munich after a tortuous three-week journey. That meant there were still over 20,000 inmates in the camp on 11 April.

Many of the US infantrymen were there for just a brief length of time, but it was long enough to sear itself into their minds forever. Louis Blatz, an eighteen-year-old in the 80th Infantry Division, said that on seeing Buchenwald's inmates on 12 April it occurred to him that the Nazis ‘didn't care one way or another. They treated them as animals. It was just horrible. Because it was hard to breathe. The odor, the smell, the air. The crematoriums, some of them still had bodies burning in ‘em, so you could still smell it. And it was a relief on our part to get away from it, but you couldn't forget, you couldn't forget.’22 On the same day, Ventura De La Torre, a twenty-year-old Californian, was amazed by the people he saw in the camp: ‘Some just had a piece of blanket covering them. And their knees were nothing but skin and bone. Their ribs … a terrible sight to see them. When we went in, some of those guards, they had changed into inmates’ [uniforms] – but some of the people recognized them. I heard that [the prisoners] killed some of them. And then they had the ovens there. Oh, it was the smell – when I think about it, I can almost smell that.’²³ Harry Herder, echoing so many testimonies from the Holocaust which note how the Nazis sought to deprive the Jews of their human status, said:

None of us, no one in our company, even amongst those who had been the originals, was prepared for what we were now surrounded by. It was not ‘human.’ It did not seem real. But it was all too real, it was the only life that some of the prisoners had known for years. Maybe it was all too human. Maybe this is what we are.²⁴

Guy Stern, a German who came to the US in 1938 and was working as a US intelligence officer interrogating prisoners at the end of the war – and whose parents were last heard of in the Warsaw ghetto (presumed murdered at Treblinka) – recounts how even the toughest soldiers broke down when they encountered the camp. Seeking some sign of normality, Stern saw the usually unflappable Sergeant Hadley with his arm across his face, ‘bawling like a child’.25 There were about 21,000 living inmates when the Americans arrived, of whom some 4,000 were Jews and about 850 were children. Within days a thousand had died and many others were close to death. As Edward Murrow wrote: ‘There surged around me an evil-smelling stink, men and boys reached out to touch me. They were in rags and the remnants of uniforms. Death already had marked many of them, but they were smiling with their eyes.’²⁶

The exact chronology of the liberation of Buchenwald is, unsurprisingly, confused – and made more so thanks to the quasi-myth of the communist inmates’ ‘self-liberation’, a feat which in the GDR expanded into one of the founding moments of the anti-fascist pantheon – to the extent that American involvement was almost entirely ignored.²⁷ After 1938 the leading role of the ‘greens’ (criminals) among the inmates was broken and, despite an attempt to reassert themselves in 1942, the ‘reds’ (political prisoners) took charge and formed an anti-fascist Camp Committee. Contrary to the myth, the communist-led Camp Committee had taken up arms against the guards at the moment – the morning of 11 April – when the SS withdrew, leaving Camp Elder Hans Eiden in charge, only hours before the first US troops arrived. It does not diminish their bravery or audacity in establishing an underground organisation or in collecting and hiding weapons to point out that the inmates knew the Americans were coming. Stefan Heymann, one of the inmates, wrote that ‘We prisoners had found out from the press and radio that the American army had reached the area around Eisenach’ on Sunday 1 April. ‘That’, he wrote, ‘was our Easter present, and we fervently hoped that the liberators would soon appear in Buchenwald.’²⁸ A jointly-written report on the day of liberation concluded, in a way that would soon become inadvisable in the eastern zone of occupied Germany, that the 21,000 liberated prisoners of numerous different nationalities ‘owed it to the US Third Army and their own international collaboration that on 11 April, 1945, fascist slavery had ended for them and a new life in freedom had begun.’²⁹

Among those American soldiers who entered Buchenwald on 11 April, Egon Fleck and Edward Tenenbaum were the first to produce a detailed report on what they saw. In their eighteen-page account, they described how they encountered the self-styled Camp Committee which they praised for the fact that ‘Instead of a heap of corpses, or a disorderly mob of starving, leaderless men, the Americans found a disciplined and efficient organization in Buchenwald.’30 Without shying away from describing the powergames that maintained the communists’ control over the other inmates, including having objectors placed on transport lists and controlling the distribution of food parcels, Fleck and Tenenbaum appraise the communists’ ends as justifying their means. Asserting that they were ‘sustained by the sacred egoism of their mission’, Fleck and Tenenbaum conclude in social-Darwinist terms that the communists ‘became hard, surviving not for themselves but in the name of the proletarian future of Germany … They consider themselves almost the sole valuable residue of the great process of selection which was the concentration camp system.’³¹

The next morning, Fleck and Tenenbaum witnessed the Freiheitsappelle or ‘freedom roll call’, organised by the Committee, which they celebrated as ‘an incredible experience, as hard to forget as the sight of the camp's crematorium, the fresh corpses, and the living dead of the so-called “small camp”’.³² Heymann describes the scene: ‘On the morning of April 12, a festive roll call took place in Buchenwald, at which the comrades of the individual nations marched by together, singing their national anthems. After addresses by the representatives of the great nations, an American lieutenant greeted the liberated comrades.’³³ ‘It was’, said Fleck and Tenenbaum, ‘the rebirth of humanity in a bestial surrounding.’³⁴ Startlingly, to our ears, they did not flinch from describing the inmates of the ‘Little Camp’, who were regarded by the communist-dominated ‘aristocracy’ of the Upper Camp as ‘bandits’, in decidedly distasteful terms: ‘They are brutalized, unpleasant to look on. It is easy to adopt the Nazi theory that they are subhuman, for many have in fact been deprived of their humanity.’³⁵ Others were equally shocked, such as Captain Melvin Rappaport. Discovering the children's block, which he described as ‘a little concentration camp within a concentration camp’, Rappaport was sickened by what he saw. The inmates (who, he later discovered, included Elie Wiesel and the future Chief Rabbi of Jerusalem, Israel Lau) ‘were starving and hungry and cold and miserable. It was like a pack of wild beasts, just running around this enclave in there. They looked at me, and I was looking at them. I didn't know what to say. It was unbelievable.’36

A week after the liberation, and following an invitation from Eisenhower on the 19th, a British parliamentary delegation visited Buchenwald. In its report to the Prime Minister the delegation was quite clear about the fact that despite the commonly-used term ‘prisoners’, the inmates ‘should not be confused with military Prisoners of War'; they comprised mainly political internees and Jews from Germany, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland and other occupied countries, and forced labourers from across Europe. Behind the delegation's official mandarin presentation one gets a strong sense of their shock: ‘Although the work of cleaning the camp had gone on busily for over a week before our visit, and conditions must have been improved considerably, our immediate and continuing impression was of intense general squalor; the odour of dissolution and disease still pervaded the entire place.’³⁷ After briefly summarising the inmates’ huts, the ‘hospital’ and the mortuary block, and hearing of torture, cremation and medical experiments (and being assured that conditions in other camps further east ‘were far worse than at Buchenwald'), the delegation, though cheered by the visible signs of medical treatment and recovery and activity among the survivors, concluded with a final, moving paragraph:

In preparing this report, we have endeavoured to write with restraint and objectivity, and to avoid obtruding personal reactions or emotional comments. We would conclude, however, by stating that it is our considered and unanimous opinion, on the evidence available to us, that a policy of steady starvation and inhuman brutality was carried out at Buchenwald for a long period of time; and that such camps as this mark the lowest point of degradation to which humanity has yet descended. The memory of what we saw and heard at Buchenwald will haunt us ineffaceably for many years.³⁸

Perhaps the most moving of all the descriptions of Buchenwald was penned by American journalist Percy Knauth. Until 1941, when he feared for his safety and for that of his French wife whose journalist's exit visa was not in order, Knauth had been Berlin correspondent for the New York Times. Now he was returning as a correspondent for Time and Life magazines, having spent the previous four years reporting from the Middle East and the Balkans. Nine days after the camp was liberated, Knauth arrived, ‘and the sight of Buchenwald burst on our eyes’.39 Knauth's prose, which beautifully describes atrocity, replicates the barbaric juxtaposition by which Nazis taunted their captives: a vicious place with a bucolic name (Buchenwald means ‘beech forest’ in German, just as Birkenau means ‘birch meadow'). Here Knauth describes his arrival at the camp as a convoy of former prisoners were marching to bury two newly dead French inmates:

In all my life I never dreamed of such a sight. The last light of the setting sun was red behind the marching men, and as they came, a dead hush fell on everything around. We stood in the command car, full lives behind us and the full life of victory close ahead, and watched the depths of human misery parade before us. I had never seen death before – I had been close to it, but somehow its stunning fact had always passed me by. Numbly, I saw death now, and before I left the camp that evening I saw it reduced to such ordinariness that it left me feeling nothing, not even sickness at my stomach.⁴⁰

As in Fleck and Tenenbaum's report, Knauth was most shocked and upset by the ‘Little Camp’, around which a Czech surgeon guided him. Here he discovered the camp's real, hidden horror: there were no people on the streets as in the main camp, because here they were too weak to walk; the people lying on the embankments by the huts ‘looked like dead men, except that now and then some of them moved’.⁴¹ The men in the barracks ‘were emaciated beyond all imagination or description’ and ‘many just lay in their bunks as if dead’. Here is how Knauth summarised the camp:

What it all boiled down to was that here in Buchenwald human life was as nothing. Nobody gave a damn about it except the individual whose life it was, and he could be taken past the point where he cared. Buchenwald was not an extermination camp like Maidanek or Auschwitz, where prisoners were systematically killed by the thousands. In Buchenwald nobody gave a damn whether a prisoner lived or died. The SS men who guarded the camp would, if they felt like it, kill a man more casually than they would kill an animal – snuff out his life as they might that of an insect that they happened to see before them on the road. It is difficult to conceive this, but it was so.42

Knauth's measured description – his first report in Time was more raw – is among the most polished and insightful of the immediate post-liberation descriptions, but already a few days after the initial opening of the camps we see how the visceral emotions of the first encounters were being replaced by analysis. The journalist's powers of description were supplanting the soldiers’ shock. Remarkable statements – ‘It was not the fact of death that was so awful – it was the fact of death-in-life'; ‘Until the day when I saw Buchenwald I respected men’⁴³ – were taking over from simple statements of astonishment. Later the popular memory of the camps liberated by the Western Allies would lose Knauth's subtleties, and his correct distinction between Buchenwald and the extermination centres in occupied Poland would be forgotten for the best part of five decades.

After Buchenwald, the next major camp to be liberated by the Americans was Dachau, on 29 April, just days after some 7,000 inmates, most of them Jews, had been sent on a forced march to Tegernsee further to the south. In the main camp the Americans found more than 30,000 prisoners; including Dachau's more than thirty sub-camps, some of them very large, the total rose to 67,665 registered prisoners. Of this number, some 22,000 were Jews and most of the rest were political prisoners. The bare numbers conceal a concatenation of appalling stories; they also tell us nothing about the state of the camps’ inmates when the soldiers arrived. For that we need to listen to the liberators themselves. For as American nurse Ann Franklin wrote shortly after working at Dachau, the survivors ‘couldn't be liberated. What they needed was medical care, lots of it and as soon as possible.’⁴⁴

Sergeant Scott Corbett was a reporter for the Rainbow Reveille, the division's newspaper. In his first report he stated that what the Americans found at Dachau ‘bears out every atrocity told about the first great concentration camp in the twelve years of its existence’.⁴⁵ The numerous reports filed by the liberating soldiers and the reporters accompanying them all confirm Corbett's words. Indeed, as Corbett's colleague James Creasman, another army reporter, wrote of those who went first into the camp:

Seasoned as they were to stark reality, these trained observers gazed at the freight cars full of piled cadavers, no more than bones and skin, and they could not believe what they saw … Riflemen, accustomed to witnessing death, had no stomach for rooms stacked almost ceiling-high with tangled human bodies adjoining the cremation furnaces, looking like some maniac's woodpile.46

Each of these first correspondents, like the soldiers they were with, struggled to find the words; unsurprisingly, similar formulations occur again and again throughout their writings (especially bodies stacked ‘like cordwood'), as they grappled for a vocabulary adequate to the task.

The emotions of those Allied personnel involved in liberating the Nazi camps were still raw many years after the events. Douglas Kelling, division psychiatrist of the US 45th Infantry Division who entered Dachau on the day of its liberation, recalled at a 1981 conference that the ‘prisoners’ in the camp ‘were starving, a forced starvation; many were sick. Their faces were depressed in a fixed stare; their appearance was one of resigned hopelessness. Their gait was listless, slow, and’, Kelling said, ‘I am sure many at times wished that they were dead instead of being confined in such a cruel, unbelievable place.’⁴⁷ Felix L. Sparks, another member of the 45th Infantry Division (at twenty-nine years old, one of the US Army's youngest battalion commanders) recalled in 1995 that the troops’ first encounter with Dachau was a ‘traumatic shock’ and that the scene that he witnessed on entering the camp ‘numbed my senses’: ‘The men of the 45th Infantry Division were hardened combat veterans. We had been in combat almost two years at that point. While we were accustomed to death, we were not able to comprehend the type of death that we encountered at Dachau.’⁴⁸

William Quinn, intelligence officer for the US Seventh Army, said at the 1981 conference that on entering Dachau, ‘the impact was so great on me that I didn't really understand what I was looking at. I couldn't believe what I had seen.’⁴⁹ He decided there and then, so he later said, to document these terrible aspects of the camp; the result was the booklet SS Dachau, one of the first postwar publications on the Nazi camps. It comprised three discrete reports undertaken by different sections of the Seventh Army (with a foreword by Quinn) and combined careful observation with a burning anger, the latter justified by the photographs of famous scenes such as the corpses lying next to cattle trucks on the rail track just outside the camp. ‘In spite’, the second section begins, ‘of the fact that one had known of its existence for years, has even spoken to people who had spent some time there, the first impression comes as a complete, a stunning shock.’50 Below the statement is a large photograph of corpses at the side of the railway, bodies that still lay there as the report was being written. First Lieutenant William Cowling also recalled the corpses on the railway track as his initiation into the horrors of Dachau, and reports how he and two journalists were mobbed by inmates as they entered the camp: ‘The people were thin, dirty, and half starved. They rushed to the American officer and the two newspaper reporters and attempted to shake their hands, kiss their hands or face, or just to touch their clothing. They even grabbed them and threw them up into the air, shouting in many different languages the whole time. Many of the men were crying and a good percentage of them were half-crazed with excitement and the brutal treatment which they had received while in the camp.’⁵¹ The scene is perhaps best summed up by Marcus Smith, a doctor with a US Army Displaced Persons team who arrived at Dachau on 30 April 1945 and stayed for several weeks to help with the process of medical relief:

An incredible sight, a stench that is beyond experience. Horror-stricken, outraged, we react with disbelief. ‘Oh God!’ says Rosenbloom. Ferris silent, and so is Howcroft, his vocabulary inadequate to describe this circle of evil. I hear Hollis, our car-counting driver, say that even primitive, savage people give a decent burial to their own dead and the dead of their enemies. I shut my eyes. This cannot be the twentieth century, I think. I try to remember the redeeming attributes of man. None comes to mind.⁵²

Buchenwald and Dachau were the largest of the camps liberated by the US, but many other camps made an equally terrible impression on those who first saw them. Wöbbelin, a sub-camp of Neuengamme situated near Schwerin, was ‘a sight that you never forgot and a smell that you never get out of your nose.’⁵³ Landsberg, twenty miles from Munich, made a similar impression: ‘What we saw at the camp our minds could not comprehend. Even after months of combat we could not accept the gruesome sight and stench of the bodies. I regarded the inmates with pity, anger, repulsion and awe, since they were human beings who were defenceless.’⁵⁴ A young soldier involved in the liberation of Gunskirchen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen near Lambach in Austria, could hardly find the words to describe the survivors: ‘I often didn't think they would survive any journey to anywhere. I had never seen anybody so emaciated, just literally skeletons, you know, breathing skeletons. I used to ask myself, “Is this a man or a woman I'm speaking to?” A few of them knew English and were able to converse, and as I said, mentally they weren't rational either. How they survived, how they spoke afterwards if they survived I wouldn't know.’55

At Dora, the first soldiers into the camp also found the living and the dead mixed together and sometimes hard to tell apart:

The camp was literally a charnel house, with the distinction that a small proportion of the bodies therein were not quite dead. As the camp was cleaned out the living and the dead were found intermingled indiscriminately, and in some cases bodies had to be carefully examined by medical personnel to ascertain whether they contained life or not. Those that were living were in such advanced stages of starvation, and frequently tuberculosis, that there was little hope for them.⁵⁶

Elsewhere, in slave labour camps, liberating soldiers such as the Jewish Sidney Aronson were surprised when the women liberated in Salzwedel (a sub-camp of Neuengamme which provided women workers for a munitions firm) turned out not to be as emaciated as those found in the more famous camps.⁵⁷ Nevertheless, the women in Salzwedel were suffering from malnutrition and dreadful sanitary conditions, and one former inmate remembers the liberators for ‘how wonderfully kind they were to us. How remarkable it was that under the dirt, disease, rags and lice, these soldiers could see human beings, young girls.’⁵⁸ Slowly the Allies worked out the difference between slave labour camps and concentration camps, where conditions had plummeted following the arrival of large numbers of death-march survivors.

The last camps the Americans reached were among the most terrible. At Mauthausen in Austria, troops of the 11th Armored Division of the US 3rd Army arrived on 5 May. Former Staff Sergeant Albert J. Kosiek recalls that:

Behind that fence were hundreds of people who went wild with joy when they first sighted us. It's a sight I'll never forget. Some had just blankets covering them and others were completely nude, men and women combined, making the most emaciated looking mob I have ever had the displeasure to look upon. I still shake my head in disbelief when that picture comes before me, for they hardly resembled human beings. Some couldn't have weighed over forty pounds. The place turned into an uproar and it was evident that if these people weren't stopped shortly bloodshed would be impossible to avoid.

Kosiek was overwhelmed by the cheering which made him feel like a celebrity, but also by the appalling conditions he found at Mauthausen and at its sub-camp of Gusen. After seeing bodies piled up – ‘you wouldn't think they were human beings if you did not recognize certain features. They were being chewed up by rats and no one seemed to care’ – and viewing the gas chambers, Kosiek wrote: ‘I never saw so many dead people lying around in all my life. I saw things that I would never have believed if I hadn't seen them with my own eyes. I never thought that human beings could treat other human beings in this manner. The people that were alive made me wonder what kept them alive. They were only skin and bones.’59

Other liberating soldiers felt the same way. George Sherman, a nineteen-year-old from Brooklyn, was on patrol near Linz, assigned to look out for the Russians approaching from the east. When his patrol smelt a bad odour on the wind they went to investigate and discovered Mauthausen. When they entered:

We didn't know what the hell to think. We had heard through Stars and Stripes about a couple of the other camps that were [liberated] early on, the main one [Auschwitz] being found by the Russians, so we surmised what it was. We were dumbfounded. The people – the prisoners coming up to us and not knowing what to say. But it's just – you have no words. You're looking at this, and it's kind of hard to believe.⁶⁰

Another soldier, Duane Mahlen, remembers that ‘the survivors looked like they were dead’. Yet another, LeRoy Petersohn, a medic with the 11th Armored Division, threw himself into what was a terrible task: ‘I had seen a lot before we ever got to that camp, but I was more affected by seeing the people that were starved and just skin and bone. And all the things they did to those people affected me far more than having to be out in the field, patching some of our men up.’61

The reports from Buchenwald, Dachau, Mauthausen and the smaller camps liberated by the Americans are now iconic in the ways they fuel our ‘collective memories’ of the Holocaust. Such reports tend to suggest that the camps were ‘another world’, a notion that is only half true and which, if taken too far, can have the opposite effect to that intended.The idea that the camps were separated from the rest of humanity is meant to indict the evil of their creators and operators; in fact the camps were tied deeply into local, national and international economies and, all protestations to the contrary notwithstanding, few historians believe any more that local German and Austrian civilians had no idea what these places were or what went on inside them. The reports also serve the purpose of providing a retrospective justification for the war, something that was noted at the time, as it seemed to justify propaganda that the Germans were evil; as time has passed, however, we tend to see the reports less as explanations for going to war and more as descriptions and evidence of the Holocaust. But Jews, though making up a substantial proportion of the survivors, were not the majority by any means, and only in retrospect does it seem odd that their specific experiences were not focused on in the way that subsequently became the case. The camps that the Western Allies liberated, as already noted, were not major killing centres of the Holocaust until the very last stages of the camp system's existence. In fact, as we shall see in Chapter 3, it is striking how rapidly the military, chaplains, relief workers, politicians and others did actually realise that more needed to be done for Jews in particular, especially in the American zone.

Nevertheless, the revisions of the past that accompanied the end of the Cold War, and the downplaying of anything that smacks of ‘sympathy’ for communism, mean that it is all too easy to overlook the roles played by the international committees formed by inmates towards the end of the war. Spaniards in Mauthausen and German, Polish and Czech communists in Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen all played an important part in transferring command of the camps from the SS to the liberating forces and in caring for survivors. In Buchenwald the International Camp Committee helped the American army to understand the camp and establish order. The US commandant Captain Ball's order on 2 May for the Committee to be disbanded reflected the Americans’ sense that they no longer needed its help, though it was probably also a response to the previous day's huge socialist-style May Day celebration that it had organised.62 The committees, then, played a crucial role in certain camps in facilitating the transfer of power and initiating relief efforts. They also shaped mythical narratives of camp resistance, thus playing into the hands of the communists who were gradually imposing their brutal rule over Eastern Europe – an indication of the link between liberation and the shaping of postwar Europe. Yet this should not blind us to the fact that anti-fascist action was more than communist propaganda; rather, it was a deeply rooted, emotionally powerful part of many people's lived experience during and after the Second World War.

If Dachau, Buchenwald, Mauthausen and the smaller camps liberated by the Americans – most of which contained few if any survivors – gave rise to these now canonical reports and images, then perhaps the most iconic of all the liberations was that of Belsen.⁶³ This was not because, as was often misunderstood at the time and for decades afterwards, Belsen was an extermination camp; it was not. The reason it may have seemed so was that Belsen was the final destination of many of the death marches at the end of the war and, with administration in tatters, the thousands of camp inmates who inundated the thoroughly unprepared and inappropriate camp were left more or less to fend for themselves: ‘The conditions in Belsen were at their worst six weeks before liberation. The camp was overcrowded. Typhus, tuberculosis, and other epidemics raged. In the hospital and throughout the camp about a thousand people a day lay on the floors, starving and dying.’⁶⁴ The famous mountains of corpses that greeted the British army when it arrived there were the bodies of people already dying of disease, weakness and starvation when they arrived at Belsen on death marches or who quickly succumbed to disease through lack of food, shelter and sanitation. It is because of the role played by the media in reproducing these horrific images, and the reports that accompanied them, that Belsen has long remained synonymous with the end of the Holocaust and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps. In Britain, one of the most famous media events of the twentieth century was Richard Dimbleby's report of 19 April (although as broadcast it omitted the phrase about ‘thousands of … Jews’ included in the written report⁶⁵). Today, the Imperial War Museum's Holocaust exhibition in London is dominated by a massive reproduction of one of the most brutal images of Belsen corpses being bulldozed away.

The British army, represented by the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, entered Belsen on 15 April 1945. Captain Derrick Sington announced over a loudspeaker, to the sound of weeping and cheering from the women's camp, that the British were taking over and that the inmates were free. In his account of the liberation, Sington wrote: ‘I had tried to visualise the interior of a concentration camp, but I had not imagined it like this. Nor had I imagined the strange simian throng, who crowded to the barbed wire fences, surrounding the compounds, with their shaven heads and their obscene striped penitentiary suits, which were so dehumanising.’66 That evening the liberators brought in food and water, with medical relief workers starting their work on 17 April. The British discovered two camps: Camp One, the so-called ‘horror camp’, which contained some 40,000 dying men, women and children; and Camp Two, previously part of a large German training camp, which had recently been used as overflow for Belsen and in which the 16,000 inmates were starving but not ravaged by typhus. As the report in the British Medical Journal put it, ‘It is impossible to give an adequate description on paper.’⁶⁷ Of the approximately 60,000 inmates discovered alive at Belsen, fewer than half were among those registered in the camp at the start of April (when there were about 40,000); 30,000 only arrived at Belsen a week before the liberation. Of the 37,000 people estimated to have died at Belsen, the vast majority perished in the spring of 1945.⁶⁸

Those who saw Belsen immediately after liberation have, in retrospect, become the first builders of a national collective memory; even today some of their reports are almost unbearable to read. ‘My God, the dead are walking!’ exclaimed Leslie Hardman, the British military rabbi, upon entering the camp on 17 April. ‘They are not dead’, said the girl, a former inmate, who was accompanying him, ‘But they soon will be.’⁶⁹ ‘These once human beings, flesh and blood like you and me’, Hardman went on, using imagery which would permeate the British consciousness for decades, ‘were now reduced to hideous apparitions bearing no resemblance to man, but only witnessing to man's inhumanity.’⁷⁰ Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the chief medical officer of the 2nd Army who was held in veneration by the survivors for his efforts, wrote that ‘it was a wonderful sight to see the joy of all those people although one felt that they were almost mystified at their good fortune. The troops themselves were incredulous, almost more so than horrified, that such things could be.’71 Journalist Leonard Mosley was among the first to see the camp; his description is fraught with a sense of his inability to set out what he saw adequately, with his text moving swiftly from ‘the stench of death that hung around the camp’ to the ‘long stretches of grass covered with bodies, among which the SS guards were moving, gathering the frail lengths of skin and bone over their shoulders, three and four at a time, to take to the death pit’.⁷² Sington called Belsen an ‘inferno’ and Hughes described in his memoir the thousands of inmates close to death mingling with the already-dead. ‘Apart from the frightful conditions in compounds and huts’, he wrote, ‘there were many horrors – the enormous pile of dead lying everywhere, a crematorium, a gallows in the centre of the camp and signs of mass burial – one enormous grave open and half filled on our arrival.’⁷³ Lieutenant-Colonel M.W. Gonin wrote a devastating short report which reads like an earthly realisation of Hieronymus Bosch's hell:

Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand, propping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open, relieving themselves of the dysentery which was scouring their bowels; a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated.⁷⁴

‘Life’, journalist Patrick Gordon Walker accurately noted, ‘had reverted to the absolute primitive.’⁷⁵

Yet when Isaac Levy, the senior Jewish chaplain in the British army, came to the camp three days after the first British soldiers, the first people he saw were the relatively healthy, those who could still walk and who were excited to see the British arrive. Levy was therefore shocked when he was taken from meeting these people to what he called ‘the hell of Belsen’, the ‘horror camp’, where he found ‘Heaps of corpses … lying in the main pathways. Those who still had a little life in them were crawling on all fours in search of scraps of food. Haggard, starved bodies, bulging eyes, pitifully appealing for help.’ Entering the huts, ‘The nauseating smell was unbearable. These wretched victims were lying in indescribable filth’, and ‘At first sight it was impossible to distinguish between the barely living and the dead, for those who still had the barest trace of life looked lifeless.’76 As Derrick Sington also noted, it was impossible for those in this terrible state to reason: ‘They were consumed by the famine which was burning them up, possessed only by the wild urge to eat and survive.’⁷⁷

It is perhaps understandable then that sometimes the liberators, in anger at what they had seen, gave vent to feelings that make for uncomfortable reading today, since they come close to replicating what they found so upsetting. N.A. Midgley, photographer with No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit, wrote after seeing Belsen that ‘It must be seen to be believed. I am now convinced that the Nazis are not human beings, but vermin that must be exterminated. This might have happened in England had Hitler's plans succeeded.’⁷⁸ Mosley noted that ‘Many of my colleagues came away from Belsen raging against the Germans, and saying that they should all be wiped out for what had happened at Belsen; forgetting’, Mosley reminded his readers, in the style of Victor Gollancz, ‘how many of Belsen's victims had been Germans themselves.’⁷⁹

Whatever the feelings of the liberators, there was little they could do to prevent more than 10,000 of the almost 60,000 living inmates dying in the first weeks after liberation; they were simply too weak to recover. ‘Everything was done by the liberating forces to save them’, wrote Josef Rosensaft, who did not mince his words when he wanted to criticise the British, ‘but it was a hopeless task.’⁸⁰ The most basic of the sorrows of liberation was the fact that so many camp inmates died after it.

The first of the relief workers into the camps experienced the same jolt to their sense of self and humanity as the soldiers who preceded them by days. Francesca Wilson, an aid worker with UNRRA, was at Feldafing in mid-May 1945, shortly after the former Hitler Youth school on the Starnberger See had been taken over by the Americans as a camp for former inmates of Dachau, the first camp to be designated specifically for Jews.⁸¹ ‘As for the inmates of the camp’, Wilson wrote, in terms that were unself-conscious in their frankness, ‘at first it was hard to look on them without repulsion.’ Although she had seen victims of famine before in interwar disaster zones,

This was worse, for these people were victims of more than famine, they were victims of cruelty. They were wearing the convicts’ striped blue and white pyjamas, and had the shaven heads and the number tattooed on the left arm which were the marks of Auschwitz. Some were walking skeletons, most had hollow cheeks and large, black, expressionless eyes, which stared and stared and saw nothing. They had the furtive look and gestures of hunted animals. By years of brutal treatment, by the murder of relatives, by the constant fear of death, all that was human had been taken away from them.82

Others were more restrained and managed to contextualise their shock, realising that the survivors were not in conditions of their own making. In fact, although one can find some thoughtless and occasionally even anti-Semitic remarks by relief workers – who had to deal with people whose reactions and behaviour were sometimes far removed from ‘civilised’ norms – most of the people involved displayed remarkable generosity and compassion, and it is striking how quickly after the initial shock and outrage they appraised themselves of the situation. Charlotte Chaney was a registered nurse with the US army during the Second World War and was among the liberators of Dachau. She wrote letters home expressing her shock at the inmates’ condition, stating in one that ‘This is one place I will never forget as long as I live.’ She describes in detail the care she and her colleagues gave to the survivors in the few weeks she was at the camp, revealing an instinctive sense of attachment to and compassion for her charges, especially the children. She recognised, though, that for all the care, ‘their nightmare was over or maybe just beginning, either one way or another’.⁸³ The chief UNRRA nurse at Belsen, Muriel Knox Doherty, provided a no-holds-barred description of conditions in the camp in her letters home to Australia, as in this one of July 1945, which describes the scenes inside the barracks:

Masses of dead remained where they were or were pushed under the floorboards to make room for the living – who were beyond caring. Each of the two- and three-tiered wooden bunks held five or six living sick mingled with corpses, which owing to weakness and despair, the living were unable to remove; other sick lay naked on the polluted floor or were wrapped in rags foul with excreta and lice … Diarrhoea was rampant. Those lying in the lower bunks had no protection from the excreta dripping from above. On the floors the excrement was six inches deep, mixed with rubbish and rags. The walls were heavily contaminated also.

Knowing full well that her friends and relatives in Australia would balk at these words, she urged them on:

You may shudder at these descriptions – perhaps you will say it is sordid and unnecessary. Read on, my friends! The world should know what suffering and degradation this New Order in Europe brought to millions, lest it be quickly forgotten and rise again in yet another guise. It concerns us all – we must not forget – whether you can forgive, only you must decide.84

The Liberated

‘I have survived and the general assumption is that for the survivor normal life again resumes at the end of the ordeal. How far indeed this is from the truth in the majority of cases and my own in particular.’⁸⁵ Trude Levi had more reason that most to feel that her ‘liberation’ had not exactly brought about her freedom. After collapsing on a death march she was able to hide in a barn where she met a Frenchman named Charles Oreste Paroldo, from Toulon, a POW who offered to stay with her until she was well enough to travel to France with him. This he did, but once in France he abandoned her at a Red Cross station in Toulon. When someone sent for Paroldo, he came and took Levi back to the flat he shared with his mother and sister. The two women were working as prostitutes and when Levi realised that they wanted her to do the same, she revolted and Oreste promised to take her back to the Red Cross. In fact, Levi found herself arrested, later to discover that Oreste had told the police she was actually former SS, and she was imprisoned for four months in Marseille alongside former miliciennes (female members of the Milice, the French fascist paramilitary force), Italian Fascist and German Nazi women. Only a chance encounter with a French former inmate of the Thekla camp near Leipzig, where Levi was sent before embarking on the death march westwards, persuaded guards that her story was true. She was released and set off for Paris where she went to live with her uncle and aunt. For Levi, then, and many like her, ‘liberation’ was neither a single, joyous moment nor a ‘return’ to contentment. A regular and settled life would be some time coming.

For the survivors in the camps, by contrast, ‘liberation’ was more likely to be experienced as an actual event, though for them too it was not only joyful. Věra Hájková-Duxová, a Czech woman who had arrived at Belsen after a month-long death march from Christianstadt, a sub-camp of Gross-Rosen in Lower Silesia, noted in her 1981 memoir: ‘The day of liberation is generally remembered with a feeling of triumph, satisfaction, boundless joy. Ours was a vague feeling of relief, but at the same time also helplessness and above all weariness. The coiled spring of desperately nourished hope came unwound.’86 Jacques Stroumsa, from Salonika, was deported to Auschwitz, then to Mauthausen and finally to one of its sub-camps. When he was liberated with his friend Jacques Choel, he recalls, ‘Our joy, however, could hardly overcome our despair.’⁸⁷ Eva Braun, from Slovakia, who had been at Auschwitz and Reichenbach and worked as a slave labourer at Philips and Telefunken factories, was liberated at Salzwedel. She remembers feeling overjoyed as the Americans arrived although she was too weak to stand, but at the same time, ‘While I was elated by the freedom, there was tremendous fear. Who would I find? … It was euphoria, but it was a very ambivalent feeling. We were frightened.’⁸⁸

Dachau was waiting for its liberation for several days before the Americans actually arrived. As Charles Y. Banfill of the USAF, who was assigned to observation duty with Brigadier General Linden and the Eighth Army, wrote in his report:

the camp had been under extreme tension for many hours. The prisoners did not know (a) whether they would be massacred by the Germans, (b) whether they would be caught in a fire fight between the German and American troops, or (c) whether they would be liberated by the timely arrival of the Americans. The sight of the few American uniforms that arrived … resulted in an emotional outburst of relief and enthusiasm which was indescribable.⁸⁹

On seeing the camp on 30 April, Lieutenant Charles Rosenbloom, head of DP Team 115 which was sent by SHAEF to assist survivors, simply remarked: ‘A lot to do.’⁹⁰

He was not wrong. One survivor, Haim Rosenfeld, who was aged seventeen at liberation and had been sent to Dachau from Auschwitz, remembers ‘only that I awoke to terrible shouts. I saw all the inmates standing by the fence and shouting. Outside the fence were American soldiers. I understood that this was the liberation, this was the end!’ Rosenfeld recalls that many like him who were ill died soon after liberation, but marvels at the speed with which his own body recovered: ‘I weighed 28kg. I couldn't stand on my feet, I crawled. A month later I went home on my own!’ This is testimony to the care given by the Americans, but physical recovery could not take away the survivor's fear of the future. On liberation, says Rosenfeld, ‘Here my second tragedy began. I didn't know who was alive and who was not.’91 In the sub-camp of Allach, Polish Jew Ephraim Poremba and a friend decided to explore the area around the camp shortly after liberation. As they encountered Americans, he noticed that they ‘looked at us as though we had landed from Mars … They looked at us as though we were not normal.’ Indeed, compared with the Americans and the German locals, the camp survivors, garbed in strange clothes and in their emaciated state, were not ‘normal’.⁹²

In Buchenwald, the inmates’ view varied widely depending on whether they were in the Upper Camp or the Little Camp, and on their state of health. Irrespective of where they were located, however, all those left in the camp were lucky to be alive, as some 25,500 were killed in the process of evacuation, and only the disruption of the end of the war and underground sabotage actions prevented the SS from emptying the camp completely. For those involved with the anti-fascist underground, the approach of the Americans was keenly awaited in full conscience of what was happening. Stefan Heymann wrote for the Buchenwald Report that the last day, 11 April, ‘began with an ominous quiet’ and that ‘The tension grew from hour to hour’. As the sound of artillery fire came closer, there could be no doubt ‘that the lead tanks of the Third Army were swiftly approaching’.⁹³ Karl Keim, a former kapo (or prisoner functionary) who would potentially have fallen under suspicion of having mistreated fellow inmates, wrote that he and other members of the ‘camp police’, as he called it, were ‘proud of having been among those who formed the anti-fascist front and of having stood with weapons in hand at the outbreak of the struggle against the SS on April 11, at the approach of American tanks and the liberation that came with it’.94 The next day the celebratory roll call took place. For the survivors in the camp who had recently arrived on death marches or who were excluded from the ranks of the anti-fascist resistance, things looked somewhat different.

Mendel Herskovitz, for example, was fifteen years old in April 1945 and had been brought to Buchenwald from Łódź. Though weak, he was still able to walk, and at the approach of the Americans he and some other inmates ran out towards the tanks. On discovering, at machine-gun point, that Herskovitz was Jewish, one American soldier dropped his gun and ‘jumped down to me and began to kiss me so that I have … that I didn't have the strength to hold out from the kisses that he gave me’. The soldier, whose name Herskovitz never learnt, promised to come back to the camp to see him; two days later, he did so, bringing with him cigarettes and chocolate. At the time of his interview a year later, Herskovitz was still speechless at this man's actions: ‘And I didn't … he has … he has treated me … I have no words! And after that time I didn't see him any more because, naturally, he went on.’⁹⁵ Herskovitz, eighteen at the time of the interview, complained about having no ‘poetical powers’ to recount his experiences, but in the course of his narrative he nevertheless managed to condemn the German-appointed head of the ghetto's Jewish Council, Mordechai Chaim Rumkowski, for being ‘80 percent for the Germans’, and explained how his family had been sent from the Łódź ghetto to Częstochowa, then to the ammunitions factory at Skarzysko-Kammienna, back to Częstochowa and finally, in January 1945, to Buchenwald. Herskovitz believed that he was the only survivor of the eighty-one members of his family.

Similarly, Henry Sochami, a Greek Jew from Salonika, was the sole survivor of a family of twenty-seven. His wife and three children had been killed when they arrived at Auschwitz in March 1943, while he had been sent to work in various commandos. He arrived in Buchenwald from a sub-camp of Auschwitz after a three-day journey in a cattle truck without food or water, in the freezing cold. In the last days of Buchenwald's existence Sochami hid with some Russians, not telling them he was Jewish. When they left the bunker, Sochami was at first scared to do the same, until he saw that ‘they were all kissing and embracing each other outside’. Then he emerged: ‘I looked and I saw everybody was dancing because the Americans were coming, so I went out. I weighed only 38kg because of the famine, and though I was falling down, I started singing and dancing.’96 Willy Berler, a Romanian Jew studying in Liège, was deported to Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and finally Buchenwald, which he reached in February 1945 after an excruciating six-day journey with nothing to eat. When the Americans entered the camp in April, Berler could hardly react: he had burned his arm a few days earlier and the wound was gangrenous; and he could barely rouse himself mentally. ‘I should feel joy at the news that it is finally over, that our SS torturers have no further power over us’, he writes. ‘But I feel nothing. I probably can't feel anything anymore. History has moved forward faster than my demise. If I am still alive, I cannot benefit from it spiritually, at least not for now.’⁹⁷ Only a month later, during which time Berler also assisted in caring for those sicker than himself, was he fit enough to make the return journey to Liège, where he again fell ill.

Belsen shortly before liberation was a scene of utter devastation. Hanna Levy-Hass, a Yugoslav-Jewish communist, condemned the process of forcing the prisoners to die in so brutal a fashion: ‘Better to put an end to it all as quickly as possible, like a human being. Are we supposed to let ourselves decay and perish, physically and psychologically, slowly but inexorably sinking into the void of total exhaustion, smelling of suppuration and contamination, dying bit by bit like beasts? We die like animals here, not like human beings.’ No wonder Levy-Hass came to the conclusion that ‘the vilest, most savage humiliation imaginable has turned life here into something that no longer bears any relationship to life as we understand it. In reality we are dealing with the barbaric annihilation of thousands of human beings – of this there can be no doubt, not the slightest doubt.’⁹⁸ And if a long-term inmate such as Levy-Hass could write this, then it is hardly surprising that the Allies who liberated the camp, in the midst of an ongoing war, could have thought that Belsen was a death camp.⁹⁹

Gitla Borenstein, deported from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Belsen, could not walk but only crawl at the moment of liberation. It took her days and days of sleep before she was able to walk. She could barely eat, and describes the process of beginning to do so again as unbearably painful, to the extent that she wanted to die. Only after the Red Cross sent her and her seriously ill sister to a hospital in Malmö, where she spent a few months, did her slow recovery begin.¹⁰⁰ Another survivor, Fela Lichtheim from Poland, felt that she could say far more about the few months she spent in Belsen than her previous three and half years in captivity, but that it was too hard to do so: ‘It is horrible. One cannot describe it in words, because words hurt too much.’ Describing herself as looking like a seventy-year-old woman when Belsen was liberated (she was twenty-two), Lichtheim goes on: ‘I was unable to move. I was all run down, emaciated, unwashed for weeks, without undressing. In that one dress and coat I was lying on the floor. I wanted some water for a drink, but I couldn't get it. I had diarrhoea for two months, and then I had typhus.’101

Likewise, Esther Brunstein, who was dying of typhus when the British arrived, was too ill to enjoy being liberated. Although she understood that being prevented from eating uncontrollably was the correct and sensible response, she nevertheless felt robbed of her dream of the previous five and a half years. She also ‘felt cheated at not having the memory of experiencing the initial exhilarating moment of liberation’. And, as she reports, the first days ‘were joyous and yet sad, confusing and bewildering. I did not know how to cope with freedom after years of painful imprisonment!’¹⁰² Anita Lasker-Wallfisch sums up the experience of ‘liberation’ shared by many Belsen inmates. Hearing the sound of rumbling in the distance she dismissed others’ suggestions that this might be the Allies approaching because ‘I was more familiar with thoughts of death than with thoughts of possible “liberation”.’¹⁰³ Elsewhere, echoing Primo Levi, she writes that ‘When the first jeep finally rolled into the camp, we looked at our liberators in silence. We were so suspicious’. She goes on to say that ‘After the tremendous elation of having survived came the sobering realization that one had lost everything – family, home, everything. And then one had to realize that one had to start over again.’¹⁰⁴

Those who were physically strong enough to understand and take part in what was happening still struggled to comprehend it and often could not take it in. Josef Rosensaft, who became the de facto leader of the Jewish committee in Belsen, recalled in 1957 that ‘We, the cowed and emaciated inmates of the camp, did not believe we were free. It seemed to us a dream which would soon turn again into cruel reality. In a sense, it still was a dream.’ After liberation, which Rosensaft and the other inmates had dreamed about for so long, ‘we saw before us a new kind of world, cold and strange’.¹⁰⁵ Norbert Wollheim, who subsequently became the head of the Verband der jüdischen Gemeinden Nordwestdeutschlands (Association of Jewish Communities in Northwest Germany) and was a colleague of Rosensaft's, later wrote that ‘the joy which we felt’ at liberation could not be expressed since it could not be shared with those closest to them: ‘We were free from the whip and the pistols and the machine guns of the SS criminals – and yet the invaluable gift of the new freedom could not entirely make up for the sense of frightening personal isolation, the certainty of the infinite loneliness within ourselves, precisely because we were the last remnant of the survivors, because we were the men and women of the Sheerit Hapleita.’ Thus began the process of searching for brethren and with it the possibility of ‘overcoming the danger of seclusion and mental isolation by establishing new human contacts through the device of finding ourselves and others on grounds of a common task.’106 But that would occur several days later. On the day of liberation there was certainly happiness but fear of the future and a sense of profound loss prevailed. Still, inmates such as Wollheim and Rosensaft who soon became leaders of the Jewish DPs were able to do so because they had already been involved in communal organisations before the war and/or in the camps and had the wherewithal and prestige to begin organising survivors immediately after liberation. Here again we see a link between the camps, liberation and the postwar period.

Compared with the few who were able to act, most of the survivors, even though they were free, continued to behave as if they were under SS guard, reluctant to move independently, shrinking from authority figures, hardly daring to believe that the food and drink being offered to them was real. In Belsen, some survivors unable to eat refused to take food intravenously, for they associated injections with Nazi execution. ‘You came in with a tube and a needle and they all thought they were going to be slaughtered’, as J.R. Dixey, one of the medical students, recalled.¹⁰⁷ The survivors had to ‘unlearn’ the camp experience.¹⁰⁸

Others liberated in Belsen were fortunate still to be in a relatively robust physical condition. Hadassah Bimko, who in 1946 married Yosef Rosensaft, had been sent from Auschwitz to Belsen in mid-November 1944 as part of a nine-strong medical team to work in the camp hospital; she was appointed by Glyn Hughes and Colonel James Johnston to set up and run a medical team drawn from among the survivors. Rosensaft believed that she did not succumb to the diseases ravaging the camp just before liberation because she had developed immunity to them, having survived typhus and other epidemics in Auschwitz. Yet despite her pride in her work and her praise for the relief work carried out by the British medical team, who ‘performed the superhuman task of saving thousands’, recovery in a mental sense required time. When news broke that the war in Europe had ended, Rosensaft later recalled: ‘Of course, we were glad to hear the news of the Allied victory, but we in Belsen did not celebrate on that day … We in Belsen did not dance on that day. We had nothing to be hopeful for. Nobody was waiting for us anywhere. We were alone and abandoned.’109

Elsewhere real scenes of joy did occur. Ernest Landau, in a piece with the sarcastic title ‘Men versus Supermen’, describes how on the approach of the Americans to their stranded deportation train in the Bavarian countryside, the prisoners attacked and overpowered the increasingly nervous SS guards. When the Americans arrived, ‘We all run from the train. The American soldiers are surrounded, embraced, kissed, and raised upon our shoulders. We, until then prisoners, welcome our liberators with hysterical joy, with tears in our eyes.’¹¹⁰ Alexander Donat, after almost two years in Majdanek and several small sub-camps of Natzweiler-Struthof, finally ended up in Allach, a sub-camp of Dachau. Like Landau, he too was placed on an open coal train in order to be deported away from the approaching Allied soldiers. After three days of aimless rolling over the Bavarian rail network and then forty-eight motionless hours on a siding in the rain, Donat and his colleagues finally saw Americans approaching:

The soldiers of Patton's Third Army were shaken as the filthy skeletons in their striped uniforms embraced them, weeping, kneeling to kiss their hands, mumbling incomprehensible thanks. In that hour of liberation we wept as we had not wept during all the years of martyrdom; we wept tears of sorrow, not tears of joy. Our liberation came too late; we had paid too high a price. Only a few of us, in spontaneous gratitude, rushed to our American liberators to thank them; the overwhelming majority went to the supply cars and were soon parading around with a loaf or two of bread under their arms.¹¹¹

Another survivor, the author Paul Victor, simply says that ‘The joy experienced at the moment of liberation is hard to describe’ and suggests that his enthusiasm was tempered only by the news the next day of Roosevelt's death.¹¹² Anna Kovitzka, a Polish Jew interviewed by David Boder in Wiesbaden, describes how her death march, which was bound for Belsen, came to an end near Lippstadt when American forces overran the column and the SS surrendered. But amidst the dancing, cigarettes and chocolates, there was no escaping more pressing fears and concerns: ‘The Ninth Army had not seen any Jews in Germany, and we thought that we were the only Jewish survivors, and we did not want to live. But they consoled us. They were telling us that there were many other armies that have reached other lagers which were liberated. That was liberation.’ Shortly afterwards Kovitzka found out that her baby daughter, who had been hidden with a Gentile woman, had been murdered three weeks before the end of the war following a denunciation. After a year in Wiesbaden searching, Kovitzka found a niece in Belsen but no other members of her family. ‘But my own people are no more. I am alone.’113

Of the concentration camps liberated by the Western Allies, Mauthausen was the most brutal. Created after the Anschluss with Austria, until 1944 Mauthausen mainly held criminals and political prisoners, as many as 80,000 in the main camp and its thirty sub-camps. After mid-1944 large numbers of Jewish slave labourers and deportees from the evacuated eastern camps arrived. As at Belsen, the death rate was very high, with 28,080 inmates dying between 1 January and 8 May 1945. Another 3,000 died in the days after liberation.¹¹⁴ Under such circumstances, liberation was hardly a moment of unfettered joy, as one survivor who had been in the camp for six weeks when the guards surrendered, noted:

I always thought and imagined a thousand times to myself that this moment would somehow be especially exciting, even shattering, but above all cheerful. I didn't feel anything of the sort! No happiness, no excitement, only desperate emptiness and a terrible fear, fear of going home and fear of the question of who I would find and for whom I would wait in vain, that is what occupied me at that moment … I was unable to be happy!¹¹⁵

As happened with the camps liberated by the Red Army, many inmates of smaller camps and sub-camps in the west did not experience the sort of ‘liberation’ portrayed in the Allies’ films. Max Sprecher, interviewed in 1946, explained that following three years in Sachsenhausen and two in Auschwitz, he was transported to Dachau in January 1945 and from there to Tutzing, on Lake Starnberg. He was saved from further transport to the Tirol by the fact that the Americans had bombed the railway lines: ‘we were unable to get through, and so by accident we remained alive’.116 Lutz Hammer, a Berlin Jew who had been posing as an Aryan, was picked up by the Gestapo in November 1943 and sent to Auschwitz, then to Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and a small camp at Ludwigslust. Of the end, all he says is: ‘On the morning of the 4th of May 1945 our camp had no guards and as we slowly dared to leave the camp, American troops came towards us.’¹¹⁷

At Gusen, a sub-camp of Mauthausen, the SS left the camp on 3 May and over the next twenty-four hours the inmates gradually realised that they were free. The Ukrainian political prisoner Petro Mirchuk, who had been in Auschwitz and Mauthausen, had been marched to Ebensee at war's end. Here he not only feared the unpredictable behaviour of the Nazi guards but was desperate for the camp to be liberated by the Americans or British rather than the Red Army, for in the latter case ‘we knew the Ukrainian political prisoners would be sent to Russian concentration camps or executed – we were their political enemies too. We were political enemies of Communist Russia as well as Nazi Germany.’ Even accounting for the Cold War context when Mirchuk was writing such claims (his book was published in 1976), it was certainly true that many Ukrainians – primarily forced labourers and collaborators – justifiably feared being returned to Soviet territory. Although that fate was not necessarily spared them, for inmates such as Mirchuk being liberated by the Western Allies was infinitely preferable to being liberated by the Red Army. If in all the confusion Mirchuk mistook the American five-pointed star for Soviet insignia and ran off into the town, nevertheless his ‘liberation’ before the US Army arrived was decidedly undramatic: ‘On the morning of May 4 the roll call was different. The commandant of the camp and the SS guards were absent. In their place was a civilian who introduced himself to us as the mayor of the town Ebensee. He told us that the war was over, we were free, and were under the protection of the International Red Cross.’¹¹⁸

Yet Ebensee itself was in a catastrophic condition. The sub-camp had been established solely to use slave labourers to build and then work in the underground facilities of the Peenemünde rocket research centre. Conditions were disgraceful and became even worse at the end of the war when evacuees from other camps arrived. On the morning of 5 May, camp commander Anton Ganz tried to usher the inmates into the tunnels, assuring them that this was for their own safety in the face of the imminent American bombardment. But the prisoners refused, for the first time revolting against SS rule, and leaving them ‘so happy that we hugged each other and shook hands with each other’.119 On the same day, 7,566 of the camp's 16,650 registered inmates were reported as sick, and the photographs of the emaciated survivors reveal why. When the American troops of the 3rd Cavalry Group arrived from Steyr the next day, the scene was chaotic as jubilation mixed with horror. Among the many descriptions by survivors of the event of liberation at any of the Nazi camps, this account by Dutchman Max R. Garcia is among the most powerful:

Soldiers in unfamiliar uniforms gaped in frank amazement from the top of their tanks at a mass of shrunken, ghastly scarecrows in filthy, striped rags, a reeking mass with their heads shaved except for a stripe in the middle. The soldiers stared at us and we stared at them … The silence of the first shock of our encounter was broken now, the gates somehow were opened, and we drew back to allow the roaring tanks and their small escort to roll slowly into the middle of our roll call square. Prisoners swarmed around the tanks, as the engines were switched off. The soldiers in and on their tanks seemed to be afraid. They looked as if they did not want to come down and mix around with us. Perhaps they just came from the latest battle, but we seemed to be too much for them. These hungry eyes. These sunken faces and skeletal bodies. These stinking subhumans. Us!¹²⁰

Garcia shouted to one of the soldiers in English and found himself hoisted onto the tank and subsequently given the job of guiding the sergeant and another soldier on foot around the camp. Afterwards they ‘returned to their tank looking sick from what they had seen’.¹²¹ Indeed, Staff Sergeant Bob Persinger of the 3rd Cavalry Reconnaissance Squadron recalls Garcia and his tour: ‘Absolutely terrible. People lying on the barracks that would probably be more than half dead, because their eyes never made contact with you at all. Those folks were in very bad shape. Some alive, too, in there. If you were not sick and crying by now, you would be before you exited.’¹²²

*  *  *

What many of the liberated wanted was revenge. Some were incapable of it, such as a young Jewish survivor of Buchenwald who admitted that he would have raped a German woman he encountered on a farm near the camp had he been ‘a little more alive’. Others did carry out acts of revenge, such as Freddie Knoller, a survivor of Belsen:

As I was looking for food (in this nearby farmhouse) I saw something sticking out from behind a wardrobe. It was a framed photo of Adolf Hitler. I took a knife and slashed it in front of the old farmer. That's when he came to me and said, ‘Du sau Jude’ – ‘You pig-Jew.’ I had the knife in my hand and I just stuck the knife in his stomach. I don't know if I killed him or not. The British soldier said, ‘Come on, let's get back to the camp.’ He didn't want anything to do with it. I would never have done that under normal circumstances, it was just that we were liberated and that a German continued to call us ‘sau Jude.’123

Shlomo Venezia, who after being forced to work as a member of the Auschwitz Sonderkommando was liberated in Ebensee, admits that he assaulted an ‘Aryan Pole’ who had hit him earlier, and then outed him as a kapo to some watching Russians who beat the man to death: ‘He didn't experience freedom and for me that was a great source of satisfaction, since he didn't deserve any better.’¹²⁴

Another American soldier, Captain Barker, reported that in Dachau he and his colonel saw a stormtrooper's mutilated body, ‘where a prisoner had been able to get a knife and relieve him of his head’.¹²⁵ And after holding his tongue for forty-six years, Harry Herder recounted in detail how a group of inmates had somehow left Buchenwald (then being guarded by the Americans), found one of the former guards, returned him to the camp and interrogated him, then placed a rope in his hands and forced him to hang himself. Herder and his colleagues, all armed and, as he says, able to stop the event, did not do so:

We let them continue. In one way, we sanctioned the event. Ever since that day I have been convincing myself that I understood why the Buchenwald prisoners did what they did. I had witnessed their agonies. I had wondered how human beings could treat other human beings as the prisoners at Buchenwald had been treated. I felt I knew why the prisoners at Buchenwald did what they did – so I did not stop them.

Still, Herder admits, ‘When we returned to the barracks we did not tell anyone what we had witnessed.’ He only did so many years later.126 Another American soldier from the 20th Corps of the 3rd Army recounts quite calmly how he and his colleagues did not intervene while a former inmate of Buchenwald beat a German soldier to death.¹²⁷ Such encounters were possible because, unlike camps such as Buchenwald and Ebensee from which the SS had tried to flee, at many others the SS and camp guards (often Hungarian or Ukrainian) were still present when the Allied soldiers arrived.

Some went even further. How many we will never know, for obvious reasons, but some survivors have been willing to admit what they did. In his 1946 interview with David Boder, Benjamin Piskorz, a survivor of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, spoke openly and honestly about how he tortured and killed Germans, stating that ‘I did the same thing as they did with us.’ When Boder asked, ‘For instance?’, Piskorz replied:

For instance, I struck down a few people. I, too, tortured.

DB: Killed dead?

BP: Yes, killed dead. I, too, tortured a few people. And I also did the same things with the German children as the SS men did in Majdanek with the Po-… with the Jewish children.

DB: For instance?

BP: For instance, they took small … small children by the legs and beat the head against the wall so long until the head cracked and [the child] was killed.

DB: Did you do the same thing?

BP: I did the same to the German children, because the hate in me was so great, but only … maybe I would have in time forgotten all of this, if not [for the fact] that the Germans themselves had reminded me that when the Russians will enter they will be killed and they will be sent to Siberia and the same things will be done to them as [they did] to the Jews.¹²⁸

Another survivor entitled his report for the Wiener Library ‘Permission from the Russian Liberators to Take Revenge on Nazi-Murderers’ and the centrepiece of his account is his murder, in Leitmeritz (Litoměřice), of an SS man from Theresienstadt (where the author was liberated) who was attempting to disguise himself as a Wehrmacht soldier.129 But such confessions are rare.¹³⁰

Yet others witnessed such acts but did not take part in them. Alexander Gertner, a young Romanian Jew who had been sent from the ghetto of Oradea (Nagyvárad in northern Transylvania, annexed by Hungary in 1940) to Auschwitz and then to Buchenwald, described the terrible scenes after liberation, as starving inmates fell on the food prepared for them by the Americans. He also said that as the camp could hear the Americans approaching, Russian prisoners disarmed about thirty or forty guards and ‘pummelled and beat them’ before putting them into ‘the bunker’, keeping them under arrest until the Americans’ arrival.¹³¹ And in Gusen, Leo Reichl saw three kapos murdered by surviving inmates who had previously sworn revenge with the words: ‘If they survive the KZ, we will attack them with our own hands.’ The Americans standing near them ‘made an impression of indifference, whilst the KZlers were satisfied with their successful revenge’.¹³²

Not only did former inmates give vent to their rage after liberation, soldiers, appalled by the scenes they confronted, also sometimes attacked the guards. Leonard Mosley reported how the soldiers became ‘mad with rage’ after witnessing Belsen:

They beat the SS guards and set them to collecting the bodies of the dead, keeping them always at the double … When one of them dropped to the ground with exhaustion, he was beaten with a rifle-butt. When another stopped for a break, she was kicked until she ran again, or prodded with a bayonet, to the accompaniment of lewd shouts and laughs. When one tried to escape, or disobeyed an order, he was shot. Under the circumstances, it was impossible to have any sympathy for these guards. The cruelties they had practised, or the neglect they had condoned, were appalling. The punishment they got was in the best Nazi tradition, and few of them survived it; but it made one pensive to see British soldiers beating and kicking men and women, even under such provocation.¹³³

The scene has also been reported by more than one camp inmate, as in this example:

They turned with rage and contempt on the murderers, who stood around, and beat them up. They made them bury the dead at the double. They fed them on the rations the SS had given their prisoners. They made them run and run, urged on by sharp bayonet points. Some fell down and were swept up with the mass of corpses by a bulldozer and pushed into an enormous pit … Then gradually the English rage subsided.134

In Dachau, one German soldier – apparently only recently posted there from the eastern front – surrendered to the Americans in full regalia and with a loud ‘Heil Hitler’. The response was unsurprising:

An American officer looked down and around at mounds of rotting corpses, at thousands of prisoners shrouded in their own filth. He hesitated only a moment, then spat in the Nazi's face, snapping ‘Schweinehund,’ before ordering him taken away. Moments later a shot rang out and the American officer was informed that there was no further need for protocol.

As General Eisenhower put it, ‘Our forces liberated and mopped up the infamous concentration camp at Dachau. Approximately 32,000 prisoners were liberated; 300 SS camp guards were quickly neutralized.’¹³⁵ Percy Knauth also reported on how American soldiers attacked at random without checking to see whether their victims might deserve such vengeance. After leaving Buchenwald, Knauth says:

I felt an almost insane desire to take an SS man, any SS man, and beat him till his insides spilled out of his body. I was not alone in that feeling. One evening when I was at the camp, some Buchenwalders brought in a few German prisoners, boys in Wehrmacht uniforms who had been picked up, unarmed, outside the camp. Before they could be properly put in jail, American GIs who had been through the camp that day fell on them and beat them bloody, just because they had on German uniforms.¹³⁶

Indeed, William Cowling wrote to his parents that ‘The Germans I took prisoner are very fortunate they were taken before I saw the camp [Dachau]. I will never take another German prisoner armed or unarmed. How can they expect to do what they have done and simply say I quit and go scot free. They are not fit to live.’137 One German-born member of the 11th Armored Division involved in liberating Mauthausen also admits to coming close to killing German civilians after seeing the camp:

I went crazy, I did. You know, when I went out into that field and I saw these farmers out there and I stopped them and said, ‘What goes on in that camp?’ and they said they didn't know. I carried a Thompson submachine gun, .45 caliber. I was just about ready to blast those people. Those people were in jeopardy, because that hatred was instilled in me at that point. And I had to kill people; why the hell couldn't I kill them? My jeep driver backed my gun down.¹³⁸

Sometimes not only former guards but kapos or other prisoner functionaries were killed by the newly released inmates. In the Nazis’ divide-and-rule strategy so cynically implemented in the camps, these people held positions of authority over other inmates and often maintained them with violence – and were encouraged to do so. Primo Levi described them on the one hand as ‘a picturesque fauna: sweepers, kettle-washers, night watchmen, bed smoothers’, and others who were ‘poor devils like ourselves’ but who, ‘for an extra half-litre of soup, were willing to carry out these and other “tertiary” functions’. On the other hand, there were those who ‘occupied commanding positions’, from kapos of labour squads and barracks to those who worked in the camp administration and who sometimes held quite important posts. Though Levi explains they were not collaborators, he insists that the sort of power they were given left the functionaries ‘free to commit the worst atrocities on their subjects as punishment for any transgressions, or even without any motive whatsoever’.¹³⁹

In the midst of the anger which was released at the end of the war, the notion that prisoner functionaries were ultimately victims of the Nazis themselves was far too subtle. Besides, many had indeed treated fellow inmates with brutality. In Ebensee, for example, Drahomir Bárta reports that the pent-up rage against these men – perhaps aided by the fact that the SS had left the camp – spilled out as the underground International Camp Committee took over: ‘It was an unmerciful massacre and was done with everything they got into their hands, it was frightening and inhuman, but just’, he writes. Some fifty-two camp functionaries were killed, according to Jean Lafitte.140 One historian of Gusen, himself a former functionary in the camp and member of the underground, claims that a group of Polish and Soviet youngsters began revenge attacks before the liberated French (and other) prisoners, having just been informed by the first arriving American soldier that they were free, had finished singing the last verse of the Marseillaise. The attacks not only targeted the German and Austrian criminals who had acted as camp functionaries, and who were dragged out of hiding to be mercilessly murdered, but also killed innocent German-speaking inmates.¹⁴¹ Spanish survivors tried to intervene to protect the German speakers from the Poles and Russians.¹⁴² Another, more sensationalist account claims that the first American soldiers into Gusen found body parts lying in the mud; not victims of cannibalism, as they suspected, these were in fact the remains of kapos who had been torn limb from limb by the inmates after the SS had left the camp.¹⁴³

Revenge on a large scale was exceptional, with the Nakam group (whose name is Hebrew for ‘revenge’ or ‘the Avengers') being perhaps the best known. Led by former partisan Abba Kovner, they planned to poison drinking water in Hamburg and Nuremberg and bread in the SS internment camps in Dachau and Nuremberg. The latter plot was actually carried out in Nuremberg and resulted in a number of prisoners being taken ill and possibly some deaths.¹⁴⁴ However, for the most part, DPs talked about revenge but either did not carry it out or were prevented from doing so. Lieutenant-General James M. Gavin of the 82nd Airborne Division remarked that, ‘of course, the first inclination’ of DPs in Cologne, on discovering that the area had been taken by the Allies, ‘was to break out of the wire and go loot German homes and get food. Anything like that. They hated the Germans and they wanted to kill them.’ He stopped them, since he ‘couldn't have them fighting the German civilians and killing each other’.¹⁴⁵ Similarly, at Landsberg DP camp, Irving Heymont forcibly prevented a mob from lynching a German whom they recognised ‘as a former supervisor of a labour gang'; they were trying to drag the man out of his car and, Heymont says, ‘The bitter hatred in their faces and their mad frenzy is beyond description.’¹⁴⁶

*  *  *

Buchenwald was handed over to the Soviets on 4 July 1945 and the remaining survivors were evacuated with the departing Americans as the Soviets would not care for them. This meant some 6,000 ‘unrepatriables’ were sent to hospitals or DP camps in the American zone of occupation. On 21 May the ‘horror camp’ at Belsen was burned down, ‘to the relief of all those who had so strenuously fought against the ravages of diseases which had claimed so many victims’ and ‘amid cheers and cat calls which completely drowned the official cheering’.147 The British erected a sign in English and German on the site of the camp which read:

THIS IS THE SITE OF

THE INFAMOUS BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP

Liberated by the British on 15 April 1945.

10,000 UNBURIED DEAD WERE FOUND HERE,

ANOTHER 13,000 HAVE SINCE DIED,

ALL OF THEM VICTIMS OF THE

GERMAN NEW ORDER IN EUROPE,

AND AN EXAMPLE OF NAZI KULTUR.¹⁴⁸

The survivors were now in the DP camp, which contained 13,000 Jews who were now left waiting, most of them hoping to get to Palestine. Since Belsen had been burned down, the DP camp was in nearby Hohne. The British wanted to call the DP camp ‘Hohne’, but the Jewish survivors, recognising the powerful value of the Belsen name, insisted on retaining it. As the DP camp newspaper Undzer Shtime put it:

Belsen is a blot [Schandfleck] for the Jewish people for all eternity … By changing the name to Hohne one smudges the blot, one totally re-habilitates the murderers sitting in prison. Hohne means approval of National Socialist atrocities, a degradation of all those who fell in the struggle against National Socialism.¹⁴⁹

On the basis of such strident statements, the survivors faced their liberators and the DP camps grew into communities in their own right.