The Bitter Road to Freedom: The Human Cost of Allied Victory in World War II Europe (72 page)

10: Belsen and the British

1. A good survey of the Anglo-American tangle over postwar Jewish policy is Arieh J. Kochavi, Post-Holo- caust Politics: Britain, the United States, and Jewish Refugees, 1945–1948 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001). A groundbreaking study that de- votes particular attention to Belsen is Angelika König- seder and Julianne Wetzel, Waiting for Hope: Jewish Displaced Persons in Post World War II Germany, trans. by John A. Broadwin (Evanston, Il.: Northwestern Uni- versity Press, 2001). Less analytical is Hagit Lavsky, New Beginnings: Holocaust Survivors in Bergen-Belsen and the British Zone in Germany, 1945–50 (Detroit: Wayne
   

   State University Press, 2002). Leonard Dinnerstein is especially critical of British policy in America and the Survivors of the Holocaust (New York: Columbia Uni- versity Press, 1982), following in the footsteps of I. F. Stone’s scathing 1946 account, Underground to Pales- tine (rept. New York: Pantheon, 1978).
   

2. For an excellent survey of the range of official and public reactions to the liberation of Belsen, see Joanne Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (Routledge: London, 1998); and for thoughtful com- ment on Belsen in the British public mind, see Tony Kushner, “Approaching Belsen: An Introduction,” in Jo Reilly et al., eds., Belsen in History and Memory (Lon- don: Frank Cass, 1997), 3–33. Reilly’s work can be sup- plemented by Ben Shepard, After Daybreak: The Lib- eration of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 (New York: Schocken Books, 2005).
   

3. The most complete account of the camp’s liberation and the relief effort is Reilly, Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp, especially 22–42. See also Eber- hard Kolb, Bergen-Belsen: From “Detention” Camp to Concentration Camp, 1943–1945 (Göttingen, Germany: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986), 46–49.
   

4. PRO, WO 222/201, Accounts given to Royal Society of
   

   Medicine, June 4, 1945, comments made by Lt.- Col. F.
   

   M. Lipscombe, Royal Army Medical Corps.
   

5. PRO, WO 219/3944A, “ What the Army did at Belsen Concentration Camp,” undated.
   

6. PRO, WO 222/208, Starvation in Belsen Camp: Re- port by Captain P. L. Mollison, RAMC, May 1945.
   

7. PRO, WO 219/3944A, “ What the Army did at Belsen Concentration Camp,” undated.
   

8. Lavsky, New Beginnings, 58–59. The numbers fluc- tuated a good deal. By November 1945, the camp con- tained about 16,000 DPs, of whom 11,000 were Jews; the numbers of Jews dropped slightly to 9,000 by the start of 1946, but increased during 1946, as Polish Jews fled pogroms in Poland. By August 1946, the number of Jews in Belsen again reached 11,000. Thomas Rahe, “Social Life in the Jewish DP Camp at Bergen-Belsen,” in Erik Somers and René Kok, eds., Jewish DPs in Camp Bergen-Belsen, 1945–1950: The Unique Photo Album of Zippy Orlin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004), 71.
   

9. Muriel Knox Doherty, Letters from Belsen, 1945: An Australian Nurse’s Experiences with the Survivors of War, ed. by Judith Cornell and R. Lynette Russell (St.
   

   Leonards, Australia: Allen & Unwin, 2000), 53–54.
   

10. Doherty, Letters from Belsen, 72.
    

11. Leslie H. Hardman, with Cecily Goodman, The Sur- vivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1958), 88–89; Report by Jane Le- verson, on DP Centre No. 267 (Lingen), June 6, 1945, in American Friends Service Committee Archives, For- eign Service/1945/Germany, Box 1; Jewish Chronicle, June 15, 1945.
    

12. Derek Sington, Belsen Uncovered (London: Duck- worth, 1946), 151–52.
    

13. Jewish Chronicle, November 23, 1945.
    

14. Sington, Belsen Uncovered, 160–61.
    

15. Sington, Belsen Uncovered, 161–66; Hugh Jenkins, typescript of diary, American Friends Service Com- mittee Archives, Foreign Service/1945/Germany, box 1, folder 2, entry dated May 24.
    

16. UNRRA, PAG-4/1.3.1.1.1, box 27, Bryan in London to Salisbury, October 31, 1945.
    

17. For a moving portrait of this extraordinary man, see
    

    the account in his wife’s memoir, Hadassah Rosensaft, Yesterday: My Story (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2004), 61–66.
    

18. Maurice Eigen, senior JDC official in Belsen, Sep- tember 9, 1945, memo to JDC in New York, in AJJDC Archives, Germany, DP Camps, #325. Eigen also noted that the existence of non-Jewish Poles in the Belsen DP camp was a “burning problem,” especially for the Joint, because it raised the issue of whether supplies intended for Jews should be shared with non-Jews. As long as Belsen was not made a Jewish-only camp, the Joint representative in Belsen found himself in an awk- ward position.
    

19. Königseder and Wetzel, Waiting for Hope, 170–90; Lavsky, New Beginnings, 70–77. The British, naturally, placed an observer at the conference, and he duly re- ported to the Foreign Office what he had seen. Major
    

    C.C.K. Rickford said the conference had consisted of the usual appeals for entry into Palestine, demands for an improvement of living conditions, and frustration at “being regarded as second-rate human beings.” “Re- port of First Jewish DP Congress, Bergen-Belsen, Sep- tember 25–27,” PRO, FO 371/51125.
    

20. For a useful summary of the work of the Belsen lead-
    

    ership, see “ The Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone, Germany: 1945–1947,” a brief hand- book prepared in Belsen by the Committee, Archives of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. This document described the goal of the committee as “the final lib- eration of the Jews saved in the British Zone” (7).
    

21. PRO, FO 1032/815, Leonard Cohen memorandum, July 3, 1945, on “ The Problem of Jewish DPs in Germa- ny,” and Maj.- Gen. Britten’s response, July 27, 1945.
    

22. PRO, FO 1049/195, Anderson to Brigadier B. V. Brit- ten, July 21, 1945.
    

23. PRO, FO 1049/195, George Rendel, Foreign Office, to Sir William Strang, August 24, 1945.
    

24. PRO, FO 371/51123, Templer memorandum, Septem- ber 6, 1945.
    

25. PRO, FO 371/51124, Foreign Office to Lord Halifax, British Ambassador in Washington, October 5, 1945.
    

26. PRO, FO 1032/815, Lady Reading to Field Marshal Montgomery, September 20, 1945.
    

27. PRO, FO 1032/815, Major General G. W. R. Templer, Office of the Deputy Military Governor and Chief of
    

    Staff, Main Headquarters, Control Commission for Ger- many, British Element, Lübbecke, October 26, 1945.
    

28. Jewish Chronicle, July 13, 1945; headlines from June 15, 1945.
    

29. Times (London), July 16 and 21, 1945, August 2, 1945; New York Times, July 21, 1945, August 10, 1945, Septem- ber 29, 1945, September 30, 1945. Lady Reading’s letter is in Times (London), August 30, 1945.
    

30. New York Times, October 3, 1945.
    

31. Anglo-American relations can be followed in Kochavi, Post-Holocaust Politics, 98–106. Kochavi cites Bevin’s “head of the queue” comment but this was not included in the Times account of the press conference, Times (London), November 14, 1945. Bevin’s Commons statement is in Parliamentary Debates (Hansard), Fifth Series, volume 415, House of Commons, 1927–31, and New York Times, November 14, 1945.
    

32. Times (London), November 15, 1945; New York Times, November 18, 1945.
    

33. Col. Marcus Lipton and Barnett Janner, quoted in Jewish Chronicle, November 16, 1945.
    

34. Maj. Edward Jacobs, “Report on the Jewish Inci- dent at Hanover on Friday November 16, 1945,” Novem- ber 20, 1945; and Berlin HQ to War Office, December 31, 1945, PRO FO 1032/815.
    

35. Samuel Gringauz, “Finfachike begide,” Landsberg- er Lager- Cajtung, November 22, 1945.
    

36. For accounts of the Anglo-American Commission on Palestine by two members, one British and one American, see Richard Crossman, Palestine Mission: A Personal Record (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1947), and Bartley Crum, Behind the Silken Curtain (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1947). Crossman’s is especially revealing, for he shows that he himself shared Bevin’s view that the Jews in the DP camps, like the Jews in Palestine, had no legitimate right to statehood simply by virtue of their faith. Crossman changed his mind after visiting the DP camps. “ The abstract arguments about Zionism and the Jewish state seemed curiously remote after this experience of human degradation.” Palestine Mission, 84.
    

37. New York Times, November 20, 1945.
    

38. Halifax to London, November 23, 1945, PRO, FO 945/596; for full copy of text, see Warburg to Leavitt at
    

    JDC, New York, November 15, 1945, JDC Archives, Ger- many, #321; Control Commission to Berlin, December 5, 1945, PRO, FO 1049/195.
    

39. The timing was coincidental. The international mil- itary tribunal at Nuremberg opened in November, as did the trial of the Dachau concentration camp staff. Dachau being in the American zone, the accused were tried by an American military court. For a detailed ex- amination, see Harold Marcuse, Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933– 2001 (Cambridge: U.K. Cambridge University Press, 2001), 67–71.
    

40. London Illustrated News, four-page supplement, April 28, 1945.
    

41. New York Times, April 22, 1945.
    

42. New York Times, April 29, 1945.
    

43. Raymond Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer and Forty-Four Others (Willam Hodge: London, 1949), xxiv. Captain Phillips served at the trial as one of the de- fense counsel, and later had a career as a barrister and judge.
    

44. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, xlv. Also see re-
    

    porting on establishment of war crimes machinery in the Times (London), June 15 and June 18, 1945.
    

45. PRO, CAB 121/422, Roberts (in Moscow), to Cabinet, October 4 and 5, 1945, and November 5, 1945; “Moscow Sees ‘Softness’ to Nazis in US Zone and at Belsen Trial,” New York Times, November 4, 1945. The Soviets point- ed to their own record with pride: that same week, they sentenced the former Hungarian premier László Bár- dossy to death after just three sittings of the court in Budapest. For the French view, see PRO, WO 311/198, Patrick Dean to War Office, December 21, 1945.
    

46. Donald Bloxham, Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 97–101, 180.
    

47. PRO, WO 309/424, “Interim Report,” dated June 22, 1945, on war crimes investigations by Lt.- Col. L. J. Genn and Major S. G. Champion; and Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, xxxiv–xxxv. Many of the affidavits are collected in PRO, WO 235/24; WO 309/17, WO 309/33, WO 309/55, WO 309/56, WO 309/73, and WO 309/1553.
    

48. One of the members of the defense was Captain Airey Neave, a decorated officer who had been wound-
    

    ed in 1940; imprisoned by the Germans in “escape- proof” Colditz prison, he nonetheless escaped. After the Belsen trial, Neave became a member of the Brit- ish prosecution team at Nuremberg. Following his suc- cessful career as an MP, Neave was appointed secretary of state for Northern Ireland by Margaret Thatcher, and was killed by an Irish Republican Army car bomb in 1979.
    

49. Alex Easterman to World Jewish Congress, Septem- ber 17, 1945, in Abraham J. Peck, ed., Archives of the Ho- locaust, vol. 9, American Jewish Archives: Papers of the World Jewish Congress, 1945–1950 (New York: Garland, 1990), 76–79.
    

50. Jewish Chronicle, September 21, 1945; Times (Lon- don), September 21, 1945.
    

51. Opening speech for the prosecution by Col. T. M. Backhouse, in Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, 15–17.
    

52. Kramer deposition, “Statement of Josef Kramer,” May 22, 1945, part of the testimony taken by the War Crimes Team, PRO, WO 235/24.
    

53. Deposition of Irma Grese, June 14, 1945, PRO, WO 235/24.
    

54. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, 25–29; xlii; New York Times comment on Grese, September 20, 1945; Easterman telegram, September 17, 1945. The New York Times on April 25 had paid special attention to the presence of female guards at Belsen, reporting witness accounts that German women guards had “enjoyed” participating in certain tortures such as beatings and the use of dogs to terrorize prisoners.
    

55. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, 47, 49.
    

56. For press coverage of Dr. Bimko’s testimony, see New York Times, September 22 and 23, 1945; Daily Ex- press, September 22, 1945; News of the World, Septem- ber 23, 1945; Jewish Chronicle, September 28, 1945.
    

57. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, 512–18.
    

58. Kramer deposition, PRO, WO 235/24.
    

59. Phillips, ed., Trial of Josef Kramer, 596, 599.
    

60. Times (London), October 17, 1945; Jewish Chron- icle, October 12, 19, 26, 1945; for Winwood’s apology, New York Times, November 9, 1945.
    

61. Letter to his wife Rosine Kramer, July 8, 1945, PRO, WO 309/17.
    

62. Rosensaft, Yesterday, 91.
    

63. Times (London), November 19, 1945; Jewish Chron- icle, November 23 and December 21, 1945.
    

Conclusion: The Missing Liberation

1. Primo Levi, Reawakening (New York: Simon & Schus- ter, 1965), 206–7.
   

2. Jeffrey Herf, Divided Memory: The Nazi Past in the Two Germanys (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1997), 206.
   

Bibliography Archival Sources

The following list of archival sources lists the country, city, archive, and principal collections that were con- sulted in the research for this book. The collections are italicized. The footnotes contain more detailed refer- ences to specific documents.

BELGIUM

Brussels

Centre d’Études et de Documentation Guerre et Socié-

tés Contemporaines/Studieen Documentatiecentrum Oorlog en Hedendaagse Maatschappij

Commission des crimes de guerre [AA120]

François-L. Ganshof papers: Rapports, septembre– décembre 1944 [AA707]

Haut Commissariat à la Securité de l’État/Hoog Com- missariaat voor ‘S Rijks Veiligheid [AA1311]

RTBF-Mons: Jours de Guerre: television documentary source collections [AA1593]

RTBF-Namur: Collection concernant l’offensive des Ar- dennes rassemblée par la RTBF Namur [AA1207–1208]

FRANCE

Caen