Belsen was not predestined to become one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps. It was not among the earliest camps set up by the Nazis in 1933 — camps like Dachau, near Munich — nor was it one of the second wave of camps set up from 1936–37 to enforce Nazi racial and social policies, like Buchenwald. Nor was it conceived as a wartime extermination factory, like Auschwitz-Birkenau in Nazi-occupied Poland.
As Hitler prepared for war, the Lüneburg Heath region on the northwestern German flatlands was increasingly used for military exercises, with army barracks built in the area around the small town of Bergen and the nearby village of Belsen. After war broke out in September 1939 the army used these barracks as prisoner-of-war camps. After the invasion of the Soviet Union, Belsen POW camp and its environs held tens of thousands of Soviet POWs who suffered a horrendous mortality rate from disease, hunger, overwork and mistreatment. Around 50,000 Soviet POWs died in Belsen and the camps in its vicinity.
In the spring of 1943 the SS acquired part of the POW camp to use as a special camp for foreign Jews. This plan for a Bergen-Belsen concentration camp originated in a cynical calculation by SS chief Heinrich Himmler: with Germany chronically short of hard currency to finance its war effort, individual Jews could be ransomed to foreign countries, such as neutral Sweden or even the United States, where Himmler assumed many European Jews had wealthy relatives prepared to pay large sums for their release.
Belsen was thus intended as a transit camp for a relatively privileged group of Jews selected as potential hostages for exchange. (Jews for sale, to borrow the title of Yehuda Bauer’s book on the subject.) Conditions were intended to be more survivable than in the death camps in occupied Poland. The camp was supposed to hold up to 3000 prisoners.
In the last few months of the war, however, the Belsen transit camp was overtaken by the conditions that prevailed in the death camps in the East. As advancing Soviet troops approached, prisoners were evacuated westwards, typically on gruelling death marches during which many died or were murdered outright. Some prisoners and guards from Auschwitz, including its last commandant, Josef Kramer, ended up in Belsen. The overcrowded camp was inadequately supplied with food, medicine, and other necessities and, by the time it was liberated by British troops, was ravaged with typhus that had already killed thousands. The SS and the local German army authorities even negotiated with the British army a peaceful handover of the camp in an effort to quarantine the contagion.
The dramatic British takeover of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is vividly narrated in close detail in the first part of Nadia Wheatley’s new book, Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom. The scene that confronted the British liberators of the camp earned Belsen the name of a “Horror Camp.” Newsreel footage and still photographs of thousands of emaciated, unburied corpses being thrown and even bulldozed into mass graves, with SS guards pressed into service for the task, went around the world.
The British subsequently burned down all the camp’s huts, which were rife with typhus, and moved the surviving inmates to neighbouring barracks and camp facilities. An estimated 52,000 prisoners died at Belsen, with 14,000 lives lost after liberation as a result of the typhus, malnutrition, and other conditions.
Wheatley’s Strange New World then moves to a thoroughly researched and fine-grained account of the year that followed the camp’s liberation. Her work on the book stretched over at least a decade, including her attendance at ceremonies marking the seventieth and eightieth anniversaries of the camp’s liberation, where she became acquainted with the site and with survivors (including some born after liberation in the displaced persons’ camp at Belsen). In between, she also attended the seventy-fifth anniversary commemoration, which was delayed by the Covid-19 pandemic.
Wheatley’s focus is on the Jewish survivors and how they sought first to survive and then to try to negotiate some kind of future with their British liberators turned captors, as the displaced persons, or DP, camp took shape next to the former concentration camp. (She has little to say about the fate of the Russian POWs, or about the 10,000 Polish DPs who were temporarily accommodated in the Belsen camp complex, except in so far as their actions impinged on the Jewish survivors.)
Among many other sources, the book draws on the diaries and letters of nurses, including civilian volunteers, doctors and medical students who were recruited to try to care for the camp’s survivors, and who initially had to work under catastrophic conditions. Remarkably quickly, some of the former prisoners who had trained as nurses or doctors also assisted, once they had had enough to eat and were provided with new clothing.
Wheatley quotes the ranking British Royal Army Medical Corps officer at Belsen making contemptuous comments about the prisoner nurses being untrustworthy as they stole other prisoners’ food. She argues that this only applied in the first days after liberation when all prisoners were near starvation. Soon after they were able to eat again, prisoners started to care for each other, with remarkable cases of compassion being recorded.
With evident sympathy, Wheatley describes the compassion of the volunteer nurses and British medical students who ministered to the surviving Belsen Jews. She is critical, indeed scathing, about the shortcomings of the British authorities at Belsen, starting with their underestimation of the degree of emergency medical assistance needed by tens of thousands of starving inmates in an overcrowded camp ravaged by typhus.
A failure to enforce quarantine restrictions on the newly liberated inmates resulted in typhus infections continuing to spread for days, causing a spike in deaths from the disease eighteen days after liberation. An experimental attempt to administer a protein called hydrolysate to emaciated prisoners caused some violent reactions among patients and seems to have done more harm than good.
Prisoners also reacted violently when German nurses and army doctors were pressed into service by the British army to help care for survivors. The German army doctors still wore their Wehrmacht uniforms under their white coats, and the prospect of receiving an injection from a uniformed German could cause panic among camp survivors.
One of the British army doctors who favoured the employment of German army doctors and German nurses in the Belsen DP camp was one John Norman Wheatley, who became medical superintendent in September 1945. (His appointment came after a brief appearance at Belsen by the Queensland tropical diseases specialist Raphael Cilento, who Wheatley describes — accurately — as a sympathiser with fascism and an antisemite.) Wheatley, as it happens, was the author’s father, which lends her account an unusual personal perspective.
Nadia Wheatley has already described her (non-)relationship with her father in her memoir Her Mother’s Daughter. In this book, she confines herself to noting that her father signed letters to members of his own family with the formal “J.N. Wheatley.” But she is unsparing in her account of the blind spots of the British medical and military hierarchy.
As the Jewish DPs at Belsen succeeded in establishing some semblance of a normal life as a community while waiting for the chance to leave Germany, leaders and spokespeople emerged, a community newspaper was published, and Jewish ceremonies and festivals could be observed. For a time, Belsen’s Jewish DP camp (which took on that identity against the initial resistance of the British authorities) even attracted Jewish DPs from elsewhere in Germany.
The British refused to recognise Jews as a national group, instead seeking to repatriate them to their countries of origin. But Polish Jews were unwilling to return to Poland, where some Jews who had sought to recover their prewar homes were met with pogroms (most notoriously, in Kielce in July 1946). Nor did many German-Jewish survivors wish to remain much longer in the land of the perpetrators of the Shoah.
While many Jews were attracted to the prospect of emigration to the United States, or other distant destinations like Canada or Australia, migration to Palestine increasingly offered the prospect of a safe haven for Jews and a place where Jewish communities could be rebuilt. Overwhelmingly, Belsen’s survivors became Zionists.
The commemoration of the first anniversary of the liberation of the concentration camp in April 1945 coincided with the Passover festival. A German Jew, Norbert Wolheim, the deputy of the Jewish DP camp council’s leader, gave a speech in English aimed as much at the British soldiers present as at the 7000 Jewish DPs gathered there, in which he emphasised that the Jews’ liberation was still incomplete and called on the British to open the gates of Palestine. Several weeks later, British troops were deploying fire hoses to quell unrest in the camp.
Wheatley’s book is both deeply researched and acutely sensitive to the human dimension of her subject. Her account of Jewish survival and self-reassertion concludes by relating the baby boom that occurred exactly nine months after the liberation of the concentration camp. Wheatley got to know a few of the surviving “babies,” now elderly, on her anniversary commemoration visits to Belsen. The book thus ends by reasserting the agency of the Belsen survivors. The survivors were more than the passive victims they first appeared as upon their liberation. The birth of babies within sight of the former Horror Camp testified to the survivors’ determination to defy the Nazis’ attempt to exterminate a whole people. •
Strange New World: Belsen’s First Year of Freedom
By Nadia Wheatley | Monash University Publishing | $39.99 | 416 pages
