Five Days That Shocked the World: Eyewitness Accounts from Europe at the End of World War II by Nicholas Best Page B
Authors: Nicholas Best
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lived if this one wasn’t transmitted. The BBC had reluctantly complied, while insisting on a few cuts nevertheless, for their own peace of mind.
Yet Dimbleby had told only the half of it. He hadn’t mentioned the children forced to stand and watch as their parents were murdered; the man torn apart by dogs for calling out to his wife; the suspected cannibals made to sit with a dead man’s eyeball between their lips and their arms above their heads, beaten to death as soon as they wavered and couldn’t hold the position any longer. He had said nothing of excrement inches deep in every hut; children throwing stones at corpses; women who hadn’t menstruated since their arrival at the camp; women co-opted into prostitution—fourteen German soldiers a day, five days a week—in return for enough food to keep body and soul together. Nor had he spoken of the prisoners praying for the British to arrive before a planned gas chamber was completed; of guards continuing to kill prisoners even after the British appeared; of invalids screaming with fear whenever anyone came near them with a needle; of others in a blind panic as they were carried on stretchers toward a building with chimneys, which, for Auschwitz survivors, could have only one meaning. Dimbleby hadn’t mentioned any of these things in his broadcast. There had been only so much his listeners could take at a single hearing.
The British had hardly known where to begin after the initial shock had worn off. Feeding the prisoners and nursing the sick had been the most urgent priorities, followed by burying the dead. Unprepared for the complexity of the task, and with the front line still only a few miles away, the British had made mistakes at first, pressing their own rations on prisoners too far gone to digest food properly, killing unknown numbers with kindness instead of saving them as they intended.
Michael Bentine, an intelligence officer with the RAF, had been in Celle, nearby, when a British doctor had appeared in a Jeep, demanding K-rations and chocolate. “I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life,” he had told Bentine. “You just won’t believe it till you see it—for God’s sake come and help them!” 1 Others had helped, too. Lieutenant Robert Runcie and Major Willie Whitelaw of the Scots Guards had delivered a Jeepload of sweets and chocolate from their battalion’s own rations for the children in the camp. But British army rations had often proved too rich for stomachs unused to such fare. Prisoners had continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day for weeks after the British arrived.
The bodies all had to be buried. The prison guards had been made to do the work at first, Germans and Hungarians lugging corpses so putrid that the arms sometimes came away in their hands. The guards had complained that they would catch typhus, but had received scant sympathy from the British. SS guards demanding a few minutes’ rest had been made to lie facedown in a burial pit, where they had cowered in fear, expecting to be killed at any moment. One guard had committed suicide after a few hours of burial work. Others had begged to be shot. Progress had been so slow that the British had been forced to take over after a while, putting aside their scruples and using bulldozers to finish the job before the bodies decomposed altogether.
The work had been interrupted on April 20 when a flight of Focke-Wulfs had attacked the camp, machine-gunning the inmates at dawn and killing several noncombatants in a field full of Red Cross vehicles. Four days later, a delegation of German officials had been summoned to the main compound. The mayor of Celle and other local burgomasters had been forced to stand on the brink of an open grave containing a thousand emaciated corpses while a camera filmed them in one take, panning upward from the bodies to the faces of the burgomasters and the surrounding camp to avoid any accusations of trick photography. The SS guards had
Yet Dimbleby had told only the half of it. He hadn’t mentioned the children forced to stand and watch as their parents were murdered; the man torn apart by dogs for calling out to his wife; the suspected cannibals made to sit with a dead man’s eyeball between their lips and their arms above their heads, beaten to death as soon as they wavered and couldn’t hold the position any longer. He had said nothing of excrement inches deep in every hut; children throwing stones at corpses; women who hadn’t menstruated since their arrival at the camp; women co-opted into prostitution—fourteen German soldiers a day, five days a week—in return for enough food to keep body and soul together. Nor had he spoken of the prisoners praying for the British to arrive before a planned gas chamber was completed; of guards continuing to kill prisoners even after the British appeared; of invalids screaming with fear whenever anyone came near them with a needle; of others in a blind panic as they were carried on stretchers toward a building with chimneys, which, for Auschwitz survivors, could have only one meaning. Dimbleby hadn’t mentioned any of these things in his broadcast. There had been only so much his listeners could take at a single hearing.
The British had hardly known where to begin after the initial shock had worn off. Feeding the prisoners and nursing the sick had been the most urgent priorities, followed by burying the dead. Unprepared for the complexity of the task, and with the front line still only a few miles away, the British had made mistakes at first, pressing their own rations on prisoners too far gone to digest food properly, killing unknown numbers with kindness instead of saving them as they intended.
Michael Bentine, an intelligence officer with the RAF, had been in Celle, nearby, when a British doctor had appeared in a Jeep, demanding K-rations and chocolate. “I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life,” he had told Bentine. “You just won’t believe it till you see it—for God’s sake come and help them!” 1 Others had helped, too. Lieutenant Robert Runcie and Major Willie Whitelaw of the Scots Guards had delivered a Jeepload of sweets and chocolate from their battalion’s own rations for the children in the camp. But British army rations had often proved too rich for stomachs unused to such fare. Prisoners had continued to die at the rate of several hundred a day for weeks after the British arrived.
The bodies all had to be buried. The prison guards had been made to do the work at first, Germans and Hungarians lugging corpses so putrid that the arms sometimes came away in their hands. The guards had complained that they would catch typhus, but had received scant sympathy from the British. SS guards demanding a few minutes’ rest had been made to lie facedown in a burial pit, where they had cowered in fear, expecting to be killed at any moment. One guard had committed suicide after a few hours of burial work. Others had begged to be shot. Progress had been so slow that the British had been forced to take over after a while, putting aside their scruples and using bulldozers to finish the job before the bodies decomposed altogether.
The work had been interrupted on April 20 when a flight of Focke-Wulfs had attacked the camp, machine-gunning the inmates at dawn and killing several noncombatants in a field full of Red Cross vehicles. Four days later, a delegation of German officials had been summoned to the main compound. The mayor of Celle and other local burgomasters had been forced to stand on the brink of an open grave containing a thousand emaciated corpses while a camera filmed them in one take, panning upward from the bodies to the faces of the burgomasters and the surrounding camp to avoid any accusations of trick photography. The SS guards had
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