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In March 1933,

17,264,296 Germans voted for the National Socialist Party.

20,680,000 others cast their vote for Democrats,

Communists, Christian Socialists, People's Party, etc. etc.

Lack of unity among these parties opposing the Nazis proved fatal.

The National Socialist Party was in power.

They made many claims and many promises.

'The German people rejoice

'in the knowledge that chaos and cowardice

'have been replaced by a calm, steadfast leader.'

The German people had embarked on that long, incredible journey

that led seemingly out of chaos to unprecedented triumph.

Promise after promise had been fulfilled.

Austria and Czechoslovakia 1938,

Poland 1939,

Norway, Denmark and France in quick succession.

A place in the sun at last.

True, they had lost their Trade Unions and a lot of books had been burned,

but it seemed a good sort of bargain,

and one got to like being told what to do,

having one's views prescribed,

especially if it meant a vista bright

with the promise of grandeur and conquest.

In the spring of 1945, the Allies, advancing into the heart of Germany,

came to Bergen-Belsen.

Neat and tidy orchards.

Well-stocked farms lined the wayside.

And the British soldier did not fail to admire the place and its inhabitants.

At least until he began to feel a smell.

It came from a concentration camp,

a waste ringed with barbed wire

and overlooked by watchtowers.

Coming in from the flowering countryside, in spite of the frightful smell,

things didn't seem so bad at first.

Children smiled through the barbed wire

and women laughed and waved their hands.

But Belsen camp was vast and inside was a different story.

They had not eaten for six days,

and every soldier's stock of food was called into use.

Water too had been cut off

and so the water cart was the most important thing to arrive.

Most of the people seemed to be listless,

beyond hope and astonishment.

Hunger had probably affected them that way.

We discovered that among this stench of disease and decay

was something a bit worse than hunger.

Moving vaguely on rickety skeleton legs,

they were too ill to eat.

How grateful they were for a kindly word or gesture!

What misery, to live amongst such unmentionable filth

with scarcely the strength to pick the lice

which inevitably swarmed over them.

They seemed accustomed to the smell and the horror.

They had seen all there was to see.

This man had died by violence.

Huts were almost impossible to go near-

they were full of tangled masses of people

who had died slowly and painfully of starvation and disease,

writhing in agony,

helpless in puddles of excrement.

It was difficult to imagine these orchards now,

those rich fields where the stolid cattle cropped the juicy grass,

for here, a few minutes away inside the barbed wire,

was nothing but filth and death.

Dead prisoners hurled out and stacked in twisted heaps.

Dead women like marble statues in the mire.

This was what these inmates had to live among -

and die among.

The dead which lay there were not numbered in hundreds,

but in thousands.

Not one or two thousands,

but 30,000.

Here is a pit where the inmates, in order to earn food,

had to drag the bodies of their comrades,

but they were too weak to keep up with the rate at which they were dying,

so the pit remains only half-filled.

The SS Guards in charge of the camp

were captured and lined up for examination.

Their papers were gone through to confirm their status,

their authority.

Each with his death's head badge.

Each justified by German law.

They were unashamed, well-fed, well-dressed and cheerful.

There were women also on guard in Belsen.

Volunteers who came of their own free will,

to do their bit.

Not sickly pale with hollow faces, and hungry eyes,

but well-fed and well-kept with a strutting arrogance.

The commandant of the camp, Josef Kramer,

was removed for trial as a war criminal by an Allied Military Court.

There was an urgent need

to get rid of as many bodies as possible as quickly as possible,

so all the S.S. were set to work.

500 Hungarian troops captured with the S.S.

were started on a grave-digging operation.

The 8.8. themselves were made to do the unpleasant job

they had forced the inmates to do.

This after all was nothing to these men -

they, the Master Race, had been taught to be hard.

They could kill in cold blood,

and it seemed to the British soldier fit and proper that the killers

should bury the nameless, hopeless creatures

they had starved to death.

The faces of the bystanders showed just a little of the hate

that Germany has inspired.

And some of the anguish, too.

Meanwhile, back at the camp,

those who were still living were being attended to.

Supplies of hot soup were prepared,

and those who could eat unaided were fed as quickly as possible.

There had been no water supply for six days.

The Germans pleaded it had been cut.

We laid on water in a few hours and before 12 hours had passed

had sufficient to enable them to wash.

Soap was provided, the first they had seen for months,

and an orgy of washing ensued.

A mobile bath unit was set up and provided hot water for baths.

Inmates thought there was a snag at first -

expected to be beaten for going near it probably,

but when they learned that the dream was true -

hot water!

And these are the people the Nazis said delighted in being dirty.

But the job of clearing up Belsen was a big one.

After seven dreadful days, the funerals still go on.

There seems to be no end.

The S.S. men are not so spick and span now.

Seven days of being shouted and cursed at

and handling corpses by the hundred are beginning to tell.

'Wait! You'll pay for the lost years of our youth.

'Just wait.'

The B�rgemeisters and Civil Officials of the neighbourhood

were brought to witness the scenes that had been caused

as part of the Nazi scheme of things.

This was not what they expected.

It had been happening for years,

but they shrugged their shoulders and beat their brows

and tried to say it had been none of their business.

But they were mostly silent.

'My name is Dr Fritz Klein. I'm a medical doctor.

'I've been in concentration camps for one and a half years.

'I was born on 24th November 1888.

'I'm 58 years old.

'A German from Romania.

'I'm speaking today, 24th April 1945.'

They were given an address by a British officer

through a loudspeaker van.

'You, the fathers and brothers of German youth,

'see before your eyes a few of the sons and daughters

'who bear a small part of the direct responsibility for these crimes.

'A small part,

'but heavier than the human soul can bear.

'But who bears the real responsibility?

'You! You, who have allowed your Fuhrer

'to carry out his insane plans.

'You, who rejoiced in his degenerate triumphs.

'You, who had heard of these camps,

'and so had a vague idea of what was happening in these camps.

'You, who did not rise spontaneously

'to defend the German name,

'regardless of the personal consequences.

'You stand condemned by what you are about to see here.

'You will have to atone by toil and sweat

'for the deeds of your sons and daughters,

'for having reared your children to be capable of doing these things,

'and for what you have failed to prevent.

'Whatever you suffer...'

One might ask why all the inmates surviving

were not removed out of the camp altogether to a large town for example,

where there would be feeding and housing facilities.

The answer is simply the dread word -

typhus.

A mobile Bacteriological Unit and all medical aid possible

together with 90 medical students from London hospitals

were rushed to the spot to deal with it.

Lack of soap and water brought lice to the inmates,

and lice carry typhus.

To get rid of typhus, one must first get rid of lice,

so contaminated patients were removed from their huts

and put through a 'laundry' process.

D.D.T. was dusted over them,

and they were washed clean, wrapped in blankets

and removed in clean ambulances by teams working in relays

in a miracle of relief work.

Two miles away from the camp

was found a large S.S. Panzer training school and hospital

well-stocked with medical supplies.

Strange that these should not have been used by the Germans

for the inmates.

Scores still died every day.

They were too far gone, many of them, to digest any food,

and there was a desperate shortage of nursing staff.

Still, one could be thankful

that they were not simply being left to rot away with neglect

among a purulent mass of corpses.

There were children, too, in Belsen camp,

though what crime they had committed was difficult to imagine.

Most of them had been saved by the women inmates

who gave up what little food they could get to the children.

Meals for these children had always been few and far between,

so they ate what food we gave them with infinite care -

nothing could be more dreadful now

than to lose a piece of potato or a drop of soup.

Clothes was another urgent problem, so an outfitting department was set up,

and clothes gathered from shops in the surrounding towns

were soon being tried on and gossiped over,

as women love to do.

There was something symbolic about new clothes.

New clothes meant renewed hope.

They donned them with pride.

Now he can look forward to growing up to useful manhood.

There were more than 200 children under 12 years old

found still alive in Belsen camp.

To these children, clean dry clothes and kind words from a stranger

were strange, undreamed of, mysterious things.

Some had been born behind the barbed wire -

in what circumstances, one dare not try to imagine.

Where are their parents?

Here perhaps?

Or here?

Or down here in this pit?

'Today is the 24th April, 1945.

'My name is Gunner lllingworth and I live at Cheshire.

'I'm at present in Belsen camp, doing guard duty over the S.S. men.

'The things in this camp are beyond describing.

'When you actually see them for yourself, you know what you are fighting for here.

'Pictures in the papers cannot describe it at all.

'The things they have committed, well,

'nobody would think they were human at all.

'We actually know now

'what has been going on in these camps.

'And I know, personally, what I am fighting for.'

'I am the Reverend T.J. Stretch.

'Attached as Padre to the formation controlling this camp.

'My home is at Fishguard.

'My parish is at Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth.

'I've been here eight days,

'and never in my life have I seen such damnable ghastliness.

'This morning we buried over 5,000 bodies.

'We don't know who they are.

'Behind me you can see a pit, which will contain another 5,000.

'There are two others like it in preparation.

'All these deaths have been caused by systematic starvation

'and typhus and disease,

'which have been spread

'because of the treatment meted out to these poor people

'by their S.S. guards and their S.S. chief.'

(Narrator) We shall never know who they were or from what homes they were torn.

Whether they were Catholics, Lutherans, or Jews.

We only know they were born,

they suffered and died in agony in Belsen camp.

And so they lie, Jews, Lutherans and Catholics -

indistinguishable, cheek to cheek, in a common grave.

The living have been taken to a cleaner place.

The typhus infected huts are set afire.

The barbed wire goes down.

The striped livery goes with it.

Soon the fire will die, the smoke and ashes will drift away,

and grass will cover the place.

Do not imagine this was the only black spot

that was uncovered in Germany.

There were over 300 others.

No German can say he did not know about them.

The whole world had heard of Dachau,

for it was publicised by the Nazis as a model camp

even since its inception way back in 1933.

On 28th February of that year, the Presidential Emergency Decree

suspended the basic civil rights of the German people

for an indeterminate period

and so eliminated legal safeguards against arbitrary imprisonment.

WORK SETS YOU FREE

Here were 32,000 men of every European nationality,

including 5,660 Germans.

From the outside, one might at a casual glance

have seen nothing remarkable or horrifying,

but Dachau was crammed with three or four times

the number it was designed for.

Here, as at Belsen, men knew hunger,

men became weak, men fell sick,

until they died where they lay on the floor.

In Hut 30 alone, there is recorded, for example,

72 deaths within 24 hours.

Every day, the dead were taken from the huts.

Here, as at Belsen, there were many who were too weak to be saved,

too sick to eat.

Typhus was taking its toll and truckloads of wretchedness

had to be somehow dealt with in the already overflowing hospitals.

Dachau had its own brothel for the use of guards and favoured prisoners.

As the women died, they were replaced by a fresh contingent

from the women's camp at RavensbrUck.

This was not used as a bath house, but as a death chamber.

Batches of prisoners were marched in here to die.

When the chamber was full, the doors were shut and sealed.

A man at the controls let in the poison gas,

and another batch of helpless victims

screamed their lives out beyond the grill.

The gas chamber was conveniently placed next to the mortuary,

and next to that was the Crematorium.

CLEANLINESS IS A DUTY HERE

THEREFORE DO NOT FORGET TO WASH YOUR HANDS

These great ovens were constructed exclusively

for the burning of large numbers of corpses.

In the last three months,

official records show that 10,615 people were disposed of here.

Their clothes were turned over

to the Deutsche Textil- und Bekleidungswerke GmbH,

a private corporation whose stockholders were S.S. officials,

which reclaimed and repaired the garments

with the use of unpaid prison labour,

and then re-sold them to the camp clothing depot

for the use of new prisoners.

DANGER! GAS! HAZARDOUS! DO NOT OPEN!

The prisoners arrived often in railway trucks.

But there had been no hurry to unload this one.

They went away leaving the prisoners to die of hunger,

and cold, and typhus.

We found them like this,

frozen stiff in the snow alongside a public road.

By some miracle, 17 men were still alive.

All the rest - about 3,000 - were dead.

Germans knew about Dachau, but did not care.

In Buchenwald, there were about 80,000

of whom 34,000 were employed outside the camp in an armaments factory.

TO EACH HIS OWN

During the first week of April,

25,000 were removed by the Germans to other camps

because of the approach of the Allied forces.

When the camp was liberated on April 13th,

20,000 inmates remained.

African Negroes, Albanians, Austrians,

Belgians, Brazilians, Bulgarians, Canadians, Chinese,

Croats, Czechs, Danes, Egyptians, Estonians,

French, Germans, British, Greeks, Dutch, Italians,

Yugoslavs, Latvians, Letts, Luxembourgers,

Norwegians, Mexicans, Poles,

Romanians, Spaniards, Swiss, Americans and Russians.

55,000 of them died because of this place.

Here Schoker, the camp commandant, said,

"I want at least 600 Jewish deaths reported in the camp office every day."

Thugs were appointed as overseers or block leaders.

People were tattooed across the belly with slave numbers

and forced to work on starvation diet.

People were coldly and systematically tortured.

There was no efficient distribution of food.

One prisoner collected the rations for ten or fifteen men.

Hunger and hopelessness turned some of them into beasts.

Sometimes a prisoner carrying rations back to the hut

was waylaid and robbed by other prisoners.

Sometimes he ate the best part of the food himself.

Sometimes he sold it.

Corruption was fostered, for it gave another excuse for killing.

All this seemed so remote from humanity,

so far beyond the behaviour of man.

British Members of Parliament came and saw,

and were sick at heart.

It had to be seen to be believed.

German citizens were brought in from Weimar.

They had to see, too - to see what they had been fighting for,

and we had been fighting against.

They came cheerfully, like sightseers, to a chamber of horrors,

for here indeed were some real horrors.

If a prisoner had a curiously tattooed skin,

it was taken from him.

We can only hope he was dead when it was done.

The skin was tanned and made into lampshades, etc.

These shrunken heads belonged to two Polish prisoners

who had escaped and been recaptured.

Some of the visitors did not care for the sight

and were assisted by ex-prisoners.

They had been aware of the camp

and had been willing to make use of the cheap labour it provided -

as long as they were beyond smelling range of it.

Ebensee is a holiday resort in the mountains.

The air is clean and pure.

It cures sickness,

and there is a sweetness about the place.

A gentle peace.

In this place, the Luftwaffe or S.S. Panzer officer on leave relaxes,

eats well, breathes deeply,

finds romance.

Everything is charming and picturesque.

But the concentration camp had become an integral part

of the German economic system,

so it was here, too.

Able to see the mountains, but what use are mountains without food?

ENTERING THE CREMATORIUM IS PROHIBITED WITHOUT EXCEPTION!

Prisoners at Dachau and Buchenwald dreaded being sent here.

To them, this place did not mean recuperation,

only starvation,

tuberculosis through slavery in an underground factory,

and finally left to cough one's life out

unaided and crowded in the filth and stench of a hut unfit for dogs,

but for some reason called a hospital.

The daily collection of corpses was disposed of through this chimney.

First used in 1938,

this camp was the centre of a group of subsidiary camps.

40,000 people had died here since the beginning of the year.

Here, the gas chamber held 200 at a time

and the crematorium dealt with 300 per day - every day.

In the north of Germany, it was the same story.

The few who remained alive were staggering on the verge of death.

They were the survivors.

And these were the rest-

hurriedly murdered lest they be set free to live a normal life.

The authorities in the camps took special measures

to make sure that a man would neither live normally nor die normally.

Neither should he sleep normally.

He was surrounded by barbed wire,

and he had to sleep on barbed wire.

Here was carnage and desolation.

Prisoners had been dragged from the sacks of straw

in the hovels called hospitals,

shot and hastily disposed of by the first means to hand.

There must have been some feeling of guilt

or presumably there would not have been an attempt to destroy the evidence.

In the outskirts of Leipzig,

an effort was made to prevent 300 forced workers in a factory

from being set free by advancing Allied troops.

300 were locked in a mess hut and burned.

This is where it stood.

Some of the desperate, screaming prisoners broke out.

Flame throwers and machine guns were waiting to receive them.

This was a woman.

Some almost reached the barbed wire.

Some got there and stayed there, for it was electrified.

This was a Polish engineer.

American troops advancing did not know that in this barn

the Germans had locked 1,800 prisoners

and set burning straw alight to suffocate them.

In the morning, before retreating,

they had poured petrol on the bodies in an attempt to burn what remained.

It still smouldered when the American troops arrived.

This man was shot because he gasped for air, trying to escape

while the rest of him burned in the barn.

The most up-to-date institution was better equipped for killing.

Transports of prisoners from all over occupied Europe

were sent for extermination in one of the special Vem/chlungs/ager.

Here, four million peopled were murdered.

As many men, women and children as you could pack into a great city.

Old women were regarded as a danger to the state.

Women torn from their homes,

perhaps for the misdeeds of a distant relative

and packed cheek to cheek like cattle for the slaughter.

These children are twins.

When identical twins were born to non-German parents,

they were confiscated and handed over to an Experimental Station.

German doctors injected them with diseases and attempted cures.

Success in the cure was not important as these children were written off,

unknown, they had no names - only numbers tattooed on their arms.

This camp was scientifically planned with a view to mass murder.

Vast extensions were still being built-

arrangements of gas chambers, mortuaries and incinerators.

The normal extermination rate was 10,000 to 12,000 per day.

An attempt had been made to destroy the installations,

but Russian troops were able to uncover most of it.

Five crematoria with a capacity of 279,000 per month.

Germans had watched them die, they had wanted to watch them die,

for they constructed special peepholes in the doorways of the gas chambers

where they could observe the effects of the poison gas Zyklon.

Here are some of the containers,

the mask worn by the operator

and the poisons used for injections.

Not only at Auschwitz was extermination carried out on a large scale.

Entire populations of villages were moved suddenly overnight

believing themselves to being evacuated

and finding themselves behind barbed wire in the morning.

CAMP GROUNDS! STOP! SHOTS WILL BE FIRED WITHOUT WARNING!

2,800,000 people were gassed to death here.

Invariably the gas chamber was labelled 'Bath and Disinfection'.

Here one took one's last breath

and disappeared in oily smoke up the crematorium chimney

The firm that built this was not ashamed to sign its work.

Again the ovens, again the bones.

These bones were sold to the Strem Company

for the manufacture of fertiliser.

How many hundreds of thousands of people are contained

in these heaps of human bones?

You see where they went, to the cabbage fields.

No doubt some Germans today can taste what they have eaten

fertilised by their comrades.

This had been going on for a long time before we came.

Here were found 820,000 pairs of boots and shoes.

Prisoners paid their own fares to Majdanek.

They thought they were going to new homes,

and so they brought their most precious portable possessions.

They say dead men's boots bring bad luck -

what of dead children's toys?

Their mothers carried scissors perhaps?

The scissors are here - the mothers, no.

But here in this room is part of them.

Nothing material could be wasted.

These packages contain human hair carefully sorted and weighed.

Nothing was wasted - even the teeth were taken out of their mouths.

By-products of the system.

Tooth brushes. Nail brushes.

Shoe brushes.

Shaving brushes.

If one man in ten wears spectacles, how many does this heap represent?

All these things belonged to men and women and children like ourselves,

quite ordinary people from all parts of the world.

The dead have been buried.

It remains for us to care for these, the living.

TO THE AIR-RAID PROTECTION EMERGENCY ROOM

It remains for us to hope that Germans may help to mend what they have broken,

and cleanse what they have befouled.

Thousands of German people were made to see for themselves.

To bury the dead.

To file past the victims.

This was the end of the journey they had so confidently begun in 1933.

Twelve years?

No.

In terms of barbarity and brutality,

they had travelled backwards for twelve thousand years.

Unless the world learns the lesson these pictures teach,

night will fall.

But by God's grace, we who live will learn.

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