A surprisingly honest appraisal
of the situation at Belsen in 1945 appeared in Purnell's History of the Second World War (Vol. 7, No. 15) by Dr.Russell
Barton  ,
then superintendent and consultant psychiatrist at Severalls Hospital, Es..., who spent one month at the camp as a medical student
after the war. His account vividly illustrates the true causes of the mortality that occurred in such camps towards the war's end, and how such extreme
conditions came to prevail there. Dr. Barton explains that Brigadier Glyn Hughes, the British Medical Officer who took command of Belsen in 1945,
"did not think there had been any atrocities in the camp" despite discipline
and hard work. "Most people," writes Dr. Barton, attributed the conditions of the inmates to deliberate intention on the part of the Germans... Inmates
were eager to cite examples of brutality and neglect, and visiting journalists from different countries interpreted the situation according
to the needs of propaganda at home."
part 1*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3eUNLivuBt8&sdig=1
part2*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4qb89BFiUwM&NR=1
part 3*: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TH3jWcVxnAY&sdig=1
*= Open link in new window!
Belsen camp near Bremen was in an especially chaotic condition in these months and Himmler's physician, Felix Kersten, an anti-Nazi, explains that
its unfortunate reputation as a "death camp" was due solely to the ferocity of the typhus epidemic which broke out there in March, 1945 (Memoirs
1940-1945, London, 1956). Undoubtedly these fearful conditions cost several thousand lives, and it is these conditions that are represented in the
photographs of emaciated human beings and heaps of corpses which the propagandists delight in showing, claiming, that they are victims of
"extermination".
However, Dr.Barton makes it quite clear that the conditions of starvation and disease were
unavoidable in the cirumstances and that they occurred only during the months of 1945. "From discussions with prisoners it seemed that conditions
in the camp were not too bad until late 1944. The huts were set among pine trees and each was provided with lavatories, wash basins, showers and
stoves for heating." The cause of food shortage is also explained. "German medical
officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was
likely to be bombed... I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three
years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never
been a policy of deliberate starvation. This was confirmed by the large numbers of well-fed inmates. Why then were so many people suffering from
malnutrition? ... The major reasons for the state of Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order within the
huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs." The lack of order, which led to riots over food distribution, was quelled by British
machine-gun fire and a display of force when British tanks and armoured cars toured the camp. Apart from the unavoidable deaths in these
cirumstances, Glyn Hughes estimated that about "1,000 were killed through the kindness
of English soldiers giving them their own rations and chocolates." As a man who was at Belsen, Dr. Barton is obviously very much alive to the falsehoods
of concentration camp mythology, and he concludes: "In trying to assess the causes of the conditions found in Belsen one must be alerted to the
tremendous visual display, ripe for purposes of propaganda, that masses of starved corpses presented." To discuss such conditions "naively in terms
of 'goodness' and 'badness' is to ignore the constituent factors..."
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