At the end of World War II, British tanks entered Bergen-Belsen, one of Nazi Germany's multiple concentration camps. Dead bodies littered the ground. And those still living - some 60,000 people, the majority of them victims of Hitler's infamous Final Solution - were starved, sick, and desperate for liberation. Unfortunately, their liberators weren't exactly ready for the task.
As author Ben Shephard notes in his new book After Daybreak, while the Allied Command had some sense of the atrocities within Germany's concentration camps, many of the rank and file had little awareness of them until confronted by the awful reality. And the first British forces into Bergen-Belsen were tank crews, not medical personnel. As the liberators wrestled to improve conditions within the camp and minister to the countless survivors still near death, over 14,000 inmates of the camp died after the British assumed control. While the military's reaction to the camp has been lauded in some circles and criticized in others, Shephard's book is an effort to objectively examine what exactly happened - and why.
Shephard's book is based upon letters and diaries of military and medical personnel who were actually present during the aftermath of the liberation. He acknowledges the very real problems faced by a military ill-equipped to suddenly set up a massive field hospital for the equivalent of a small city. The immediacy and urgency of the camp's conditions, and the fact that many of the prisoners were near death when the British arrived is clear. At the same time, however, Shephard doesn't shy away from the correlated reality that many of the deaths might well have been prevented through relatively simple medical care. The delays in evacuating the camps doomed many to die; likewise, the food offered to the inmates was often too rich and heavy for people who had been starved for so long.
Article comments
1 - David Vernon
William,
That's a fine book review. I too found that Shephard handled the differing views on the British liberation quite masterfully. There was one 'voice' absent from the book, and that was the German view. Whilst I imagine tracking down German witnesses to the atrocities would have been difficult, it would have added a further dimension into the appalling way humans can treat other humans. Even if the Germans were unwilling to speak, perhaps some of the Hungarian guards who were so prominent after liberation may have been able to provide some further insights.
Maybe that's another book.
Cheers,
David Vernon
Editor, Men at Birth (2006) and With Women (2007)