Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Part 2/4‏

EXCHANGE TRANSPORTS AND RELEASE ACTIONS
Only for a few prisoners was the hope fulfilled to be released in the course of an exchange-program from Bergen-Belsen. At the end of June 1944,  222 Jewish detainees travelled as exchange persons to Palestine. In July 1944, 70 Jews were able to leave Bergen-Belsen with British passports. During the so-called German-American civilian exchange at the end of January 1945, a total of 301 prisoners that left originally Bergen-Belsen. However, only 136 of them reached Switzerland. For some unknown reason the rest were placed in internment camps in southern Germany, where they found  better living conditions than in Bergen-Belsen. Moreover, almost all the 1,683 Hungarian prisoners in the camp reached in August and December 1944 the Swiss border their freedom and 105 Jews from various European countries, which laid claim to the Turkish nationality, went via Göteborg [Sweden] in March 1945, to Istanbul.

Discharge certificate for the Communists Grünewald, dated October 1940

The vast majority of prisoners lived between the hope of tension and despair for release on the face of the ever deteriorating living conditions in Bergen-Belsen. The feasibility of an exchange was , however, the fact that in Bergen- Belsen in the months following, no open resistance ever existed and , aside from the prison camp proper , probably there were no escape attempts . This was the longer, the more likely deceptive alternate which ended all hope and meant for the prisoners , however, a serious mental stress on social relations and more often than not, self-destructive. The arbitrariness , the uncertainty, the unpredictability of one's own fate was for the prisoners perhaps even more strongly felt than in other concentration camps, where , for example, the forced labour for the armaments industry (which in Bergen-Belsen did not play any role) represented for a prisoner still comprehensible rationality and to some extent a purpose to carry on . But in Bergen-Belsen your own life situation appeared to the prisoners more than contradictory and irrational : The living conditions were in an increasingly stark contrast to the established status of the detainees as "exchange hostages".
A particular status within the stay in the camp had the so-called 'Kasztner group' that arrived in mid-July 1944 in Bergen-Belsen and was placed here in handling transfers of internees. this group was a Zionist rescue project in the framework of negotiations between SS on one hand and a Zionist rescue committee in Budapest on the other, in which the Hungarian-Jewish journalist Rudolf Kasztner played the leading role. This Kasztner group presented on the whole a cross section of different religious and political-social groupings of Hungarian Judaism , but included a larger number of refugees, especially from Poland, Slovakia and Yugoslavia, at the time of the German invasion of Hungary they had mostly lived there with forged documents.

Rudolf Kastner

The group should have left the country originally via Germany , France and Spain , the transport was , however, diverted , and finally delivered to Bergen- Belsen. Its fate depended on the progress of negotiations in Budapest, which hung again by a thread . The material conditions of Kasztner group were much better than those with the prisoners in the Star Camp , especially as the prisoners brought  into this part of the camp, were able to bring a larger amount of food with them . Compulsory labour was not required,  and the SS left them to a greater degree of autonomy than in the Star Camp . In August 1944, the first subjects of 318 persons, left after payment of ransom had been paid, they could leave Bergen-Belsen and go to Switzerland , almost all the other members of the Kasztner group were to follow them in early December 1944. Few days after this group had left Bergen- Belsen , the Hungarian Camp was occupied again  with new transports of Hungarian Jews who were brought in part,  directly from Budapest , partly from labour camps in Austria to Bergen- Belsen. These involved a total of 4,100 to 4,200 Jewish women and children, who were also considered as exchange prisoners.

The arrival in Switzerland of some of the passengers, August or December 1944

[Rudolf Israel Kastner (often spelled 'Kasztner') was an Austro-Hungarian-born Jew, Zionist activist, journalist and lawyer. He became known for facilitating the 'Blood for goods' proposal which was supposed to help Jews escape German-occupied Hungary during the Holocaust. He was assassinated in 1957 after an Israeli court accused him of having collaborated with the Nazis.
THE ASSASSINATION
[Minutes after midnight on March 4, 1957, Kastner was shot as he arrived at his Tel Aviv home. The attack was carried out by a three-man squad from a group of veterans from the pre-state right-wing militia Lehi led by Yosef Menkes and Yaakov Heruti. Menkes had also been a member of the post-independence terrorist group Kingdom of Israel. The assassination squad consisted of Menkes (the leader), Ze'ev Eckstein (the shooter), and Dan Shemer (the driver). The three men had waited in a jeep parked outside Katsner's house. Eckstein disembarked and approached Kastner as he locked his car, and asked him if he was Rudolf Kastner. When Kastner confirmed, Eckstein pulled out a handgun and fired three times. The first shot was a spent bullet, the second hit the car door, and the third hit Kastner in the upper body, critically wounding him. Katsner attempted to escape, but died of his injuries on March 15. In Gaylen Ross' film "Killing Kasztner" Ze'ev Eckstein presents a very different sequence of events and implies that someone else fired a fatal fourth bullet. See section "Documentary" below.
About an hour after the shooting, Shin Bet (Israel's internal security service) opened an investigation, focusing its efforts on the Lehi veterans group led by Menkes and Heruti. The group had been linked to various murder incidents and various actions against Kastner, and it was suspected that Menkes bore personal responsibility. In addition, Kastner delivered a description of the assassins at the hospital. After a lengthy investigation, Shin Bet identified Eckstein, Shemer and Menkes as the assassins. Shemer was the first to confess his role, and implicated Eckstein, who subsequently confessed and implicated Menkes. In addition, police tracked down the jeep used by the assassins, which was found to contain the murder weapon and fingerprints belonging to Shemer. Subsequently, twenty members of their organization were arrested, including Heruti, and two weapons magazines belonging to the group were discovered.
Eckstein, 24, stated that he killed Kastner to avenge his activities in conjunction with Nazi figures such as Adolf Eichmann. During the trial it turned out that Eckstein had been a paid informer of Shin Bet a few months before the shooting. The idea that the killing was a government conspiracy has been described by Elliott Jager as "absolute nonsense", because the head of the intelligence service was a close personal friend of Kastner. But recent documentation and some hints by people in Kastner's circles point to the possibility that the former head of the Jewish agency and at that time Prime Minister Moshe Sharet had been working together with Kastner on receiving the "Becher Treasure" – a huge amount of stolen Jewish money and property, for the country of Israel, and not into the hands of the Allied countries, let alone kept in the hand of the "former" Nazis. The price of freeing a small group of SS officers seemed at the time negligible, and fit in with continued ties that Kastner had with the Nazis at the end of the war. But the "Becher Treasure" turned out to be a fraction of the value expected, or at least by the 1950s the Israelis were convinced so, and it was all but impossible to start explaining the Jewish postwar compliance with captured Nazis to the public.
Kastner's killers were given life sentences, but were pardoned after seven years. In January 1958 the Supreme Court of Israel overturned most of the judgement against Kastner, stating that the lower court had "erred seriously" in putting the emphasis on Kastner's moral conduct, leaving that "For history to judge".
In an open letter by Tamir to the Tel-Aviv municipality, who were planning to call a street after Dr. Kastner's name, he showed that "Kastner was never given exoneration", but rather that it was only not proven if his actions which during the court case were unanimously agreed upon as being despicable, caused the murder or rather caused the failure of escape for over a million Jews from Hungary, deported and killed in the last months of the war. The court, he said, left that and only that to history.
His granddaughter Merav Michaeli, voted in 2013 to the Israeli Parliament spoke of her grandfather, who saved "tens of thousands of Jews" when standing up to and dealing with Eichmann, who had said: You look worn out. Maybe we should send you for some short vacation at Auschwitz. He calmly pulled out a cigarette and smoked. A proud Jew with no fear." It is natural to make such heroism statements about a grandfather, but proof is required.sic] (For further reading, Google: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rudolf_Kastner)
THE PRISONER COMPOUND
The first and only part of the camp, in which non-Jewish prisoners were housed, is referred to in the historiography as the 'prison camp'(Häftlingslager). This part, where only men lived, was operated from the beginning as a typical concentration camp and differed significantly from the situation in the Transit Camp. (Aufenthaltslager) It was first used to accommodate the construction commando. At the end of February 1944, it was disbanded and the surviving prisoners moved to other concentration camps Neuengamme and Sachsenhausen.
The barracks of the prison camp were only for a short time empty. From the end of March 1944, sick prisoners unable to work were brought from other concentration camps into this part of the camp. From that point onward, it was the starting point for the following months, while more and more increasing the expansion in an entirely different direction of Bergen-Belsen, which would eventually change the character of this camp and the living conditions of the prisoners in a dramatic way.
The first Patient Transport , arrived in late March 1944 in Bergen-Belsen , and consisted of exactly 1,000 prisoners from the concentration camp of Mittelbau-Dora , and was cynically designated by the SS as a "Recreation Centre" . But no serious efforts for medical care of the sick prisoners, who were eventually transferred back to their original camp,  after their recovery, when inmate doctors and medication slowly arrived.  The sick prisoners had initially to live for days in barracks without any type of utensils or equipment after their reception. They were totally undernourished and lived in catastrophic hygienic conditions and were, despite their poor physical condition, exposed to a sadistic regime of the SS and Kapos . The mortality rate in the prison camp was therefore alarmingly high . Just four weeks after their arrival in Bergen-Belsen more than a third of the prisoners had died of this Transport that came  from Mittelbau-Dora .

'Living among the Dead'

In the following months, further transports with sick prisoners arrived at the prison camp, by the end of of 1944 it was an overall total of about 4,000, of which 1,700 died by late 1944 over that same period, in other words shortly upon their admittance. Given the catastrophic living conditions in the camp area there were only few Inmate Doctors that had been transferred to the prison camp since the spring of 1944 but could hardly effectively help their ailing fellow sufferers (Leidensgenossen).
     Prison clothes , hunger , hard work to exhaustion and ill-treatment by the SS and Kapos characterized the situation in the prison camp (Häftlingslager) . But not only these conditions were to blame for the huge death toll . The prison camp was by the summer of 1944 also the scene of a mass murder, when the SS-Administration used as the " male head-nurse " the criminal prisoner Karl Rhote . He killed by phenol injections, partly under the direction of camp management , partly from his perverse  own drive about 200 people in the prison camp . In the memoirs of survivors,  the terror is still very noticeable that triggered these murders in this part of the prison camp : "When Karl comes into the room ,  downright panic was breaking out . All ran out of fear as fast as they could out to the doors and windows or would  hide under the beds. Then we hear the sick, who's Karl's accomplices held down, with heartbreaking lamentations : ' Doctor, I'm not sick , I'm not sick ...' Yet all this is played out in a sort of full silence of others in which one feels the presence of death who chooses his victims and spread the atmosphere of a fearsome closeness  . We do not dare to look to the other end of the corridor where this occurred . We stare in silence, we listen to the sounds , especially on the high-pitched hiss  of Karl's belt with which he binds his victims when he swings the belt around him casually and chooses his victims ' . Pierre Petit describes Rothes murders also : ' Rothes innate sadism and his perversion increased with time to pathological greed and an unnatural blood-lust always accepted the abominable forms. At first he gave his deadly injections directly into the heart , the victim reared up , twitched a few times back and forth and then lay still . [ ... ] To the agony of the victims, to extend their agony,  in order to increase his own excitement, he began to vary the method of injections . He went on to primarily to apply the phenol intravenously. In these cases, it took three to five endless minutes before the victim was finally redeemed , the body froze in a last spasm ' . [ Pierre Petit, protective custody Ling 2201 '. That was Bergen-Belsen , in Rappel . Institutions de la Ligue Luxembourgeoise of Prisonniers Deportes et Politiques , H. 11/12 (1965 ) , page 579th sic]
These particular murders came only to an end when Karl Rothe had lost the protection by the SS doctors . A detainee tribunal sentenced him to death , and Rothe was later killed at night by fellow inmates in a shanty of the prisoner's compound.

Women survivors suffering from Typhus in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp'. 

Only once did the SS conduct a selection in the prisoner camp with the aim of transporting 200 supposedly healthy prisoners back, as forced labourers, to where they had come from . This transport consisted about half of the prisoners from the Mittelbau-Dora. The transport leaving  Bergen-Belsen by the end of March , the remaining left at the end of July 1944 for Buchenwald.
 Conversely, the number of sick prisoners who were sent to Bergen-Belsen , did not decrease, and with the increase of frail and sick inmates the prison camp was gradually overcrowded .  Parallel with this, Evacuation Transports from the East, which commenced  by the end of 1944 with a high proportion of sick prisoners into the camp , so that the SS was eventually forced to use part of the previous Star Camp, in order to set up the Detainee Camp II , in the spring of 1945, and within a short time thousands of male prisoners were herded together, with the result that eventually from here, typhus spread right through the entire camp with devastating effect and with that, the Detainee Camp II had one of the highest death rates.
THE WOMEN'S CAMP
With the establishment of a women's camp - Historians call it 'Small Women's Camp' - (Kleines Frauenlager). In the summer of 1944 began a second phase in the process of expanding the camp's function , which in fact was a further step towards the conversion from a "Holding Camp", to a "typical" concentration camp. In early August several large tents on the southern edge of the camp were erected, then in the middle of August , two transports with a total of 4,000 women and children arrived and had been admitted . These were mainly Polish subjects, who had been arrested and deported in connection with the National Polish-Warsaw-Uprising . Most left after a few days stay at Bergen-Belsen and sent further to satellite camps or other concentration camps to be used as  forced labour. In the following months the women's camp had primarily the function of a distribution centre for women that should be used in the defence industry in other camps . On 23 August 1944, the first transport of women arrived from Auschwitz , who came  within the prcess of the initial evacuation program of the women's camp from Birkenau. By early November 1944 a total of about 8,000 women from Auschwitz were transferred into the women's camp of Bergen-Belsen , among them was Anne Frank and her three years older sister Margot . Both died here in March 1945.  They, too were initially housed in the improvised tent camp until a heavy storm on 7 November 1944 destroyed most of the tents, so that new accommodation was required for the inmates of the women's camp, that eventually led to the use of a barracks complex at the "Small women's camp" , which had previously served as an SS clothing magazine and was located on the edge of the main camp . By the end of 1944 a total of about 13,500 women predominantly Jewish women, particularly from Poland and Hungary were deported to this part of the camp.

KZ Bergen-Belsen Map, September 1944'

With the transports from Auschwitz mainly Polish and Hungarian Jewesses arrived, but most of them were transported from here to work details into other concentration camps shortly after their arrival. Bergen-Belsen had within the vicinity at this time three Satellite Camps of their own, where most of the women were transferred to. Namely: The Army Ammunition Depot in Hambühren , at a Shooting Range of Rheinmetall Unterlüß and in the Explosive Factory Eibia & Wolf in Bomlitz.

Women inside the Small Camp'

                                                                                                                                 
  APPENDIX
"JEWS FOR SALE": THE RUDOLF KRASZTNER TRANSPORT.
·During the years that the Nazis controlled Germany and then large parts of Europe there were numerous attempts to bribe officials in order to save individuals, including large numbers of Jews.  These efforts, mostly futile, are described in Yehuda Bauer's Jews for Sale? : Nazi-Jewish negotiations, 1933-1945 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Small as they were, compared to the total Jewish population held by the Nazis, two efforts in 1944 were successful.  More than 1,900 Jews, mostly Hungarian Jews, were delivered by train across the Swiss border.  The principal negotiator for these two transports, Rudolph (Rezsö) Kasztner, remains a controversial individual, who was later murdered in Israel.  On the night of March 3, 1957, Rudolph (Rezsö) Kasztner became the first Jewish victim of a Jewish political assassination in the State of Israel, murdered for determining which Hungarian Jews to save from extermination during the Holocaust.  Persons interested in greater details on Kasztner may wish to read Anna Porter's Kasztner's train: the true story of Rezsö Kasztner, unknown hero of the Holocaust (2007), and examine a website devoted to Kasztner's efforts at http://www.kasztnermemorial.com.  At this site, the following is written:
"He [Kastzner] was murdered for what some would consider 'playing God,' determining which Hungarian Jews to save from extermination during the Holocaust.  Like Oskar Schindler, Kasztner negotiated with the Nazis to save lives.  Unlike Schindler, however, Kasztner's actions and motives were questioned by Hungarian Holocaust survivors whose families were not included in the select group of Jews to be saved."
The memorial site, the purpose of which is to resuscitate Kasztner's reputation, and is thus sympathetic to him states: "The prospect of saving Hungarian Jewry through ransom, odious as it appears, proved an alluring chance at beating the final solution to Kasztner and his associates....  A number of historians have also credited Kasztner and the Vaadah with saving the remnants of the Budapest ghetto and Kasztner in particular with saving the Jews who remained alive in places like Bergen-Belsen immediately at war's end.  Despite the many lives saved and the heroic efforts expended it was clear at war's end that the grand plan of saving Hungarian Jewry failed.  The record of Kasztner's heroism was buried under the rubble of that failure."
Particularly interesting is the transcript of the interview by Claude Lanzmann with Hansi Brand, wife of Joel Brand, one of the members of the Relief and Rescue Committeee of Budapest (the Vaadah, or Vaadat Ezra ve'Hatzalah, generally referred to as the Vaadah, or the Committee).  Hansi describes how the Hungarians thought they would escape the "Holocaust"; however, when the Germans invaded Hungary in 1944, their illusions were shattered.
The Committee was established in 1943 to help Jewish refugees, particularly those from Slovakia and Poland, who had fled to Hungary to escape the Nazis.  The leaders of the Committee were Rudolph (Rezsö) Kasztner, a Zionist from Cluj; Joel Brand, also from Transylvania and, in the words of Saul Friedlander, "something of an adventurer in politics" (Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945, p. 621), and Otto Komoly, an engineer from Budapest.  Around March/April 1944 the focus changed to negotiations with Eichmann for the exchange of Hungarian persons for military trucks.  Eichmann told Brand that 10,000 Jews could be saved for every truck delivered to the Germans.  The final proposal was the exchange of 800,000 Hungarian lives for 10,000 trucks.  Brand was to be allowed to go to Istanbul to raise the funds along with Bandi Grosz, another Hungarian Jew.  On May 19, 1944 Brand met with the Yishuv (Jewish community in Mandate Palestine) representatives in Istanbul.  The intricate details of the meetings of all parties-in Turkey, Palestine, and Syria -- are described by both Brand and Friedlander.  Hansi and her children remained in Hungary, as hostages one presumes; but Hansi describes her meeting with Eichmann, which surprises Lanzmann.  Brand's mission ultimately was not successful.
Hansi brought Kasztner to meet Eichmann, which began the negotiations to bring the Jews from the provinces -- including Cluj -- to Budapest. "She says that Eichmann told her husband that he should hurry on his mission to Istanbul, because 12,000 Jews per day were taken to Auschwitz.  Lanzmann questions Hansi Brand about the highly controversial rescue mission, the Kasztner Train (Lanzmann does not use this term), especially about the "privileged" nature of the transport and the 388 passengers from Cluj, Kasztner's home town."
"Lanzmann says that Kasztner is sometimes criticized for not warning the Jews in Cluj, for example, about what would happen to them in Auschwitz.  Hansi Brand says that is the most evil lie and gives examples of Jewish leaders from Cluj (she uses the German name of the town, Klausenburg) who knew quite well what Auschwitz meant.  Lanzmann says that some people from Cluj who survived Auschwitz later complained that they were not told what it meant to be sent to the camp.  Hansi Brand says that many people did not want to know that the Jews were being exterminated.  She finds it impossible that anyone could not know by 1944 what was happening in German-occupied areas.  She talks about the postwar Kasztner trial, in which Judge Benjamin Halevi believed the witnesses against Kasztner.  They continue to talk about how much information was or should have been given to the Jews of Cluj."
A timeline of events is available at http://www.kasztnermemorial.com/apr44.html. A small part is excerpted below.
April 5, 1944: Rezsö Kasztner and Joel Brand meet for the first time with Wisliceny and members of the SS.  Wisliceny demanded $2 million dollars to implement in Hungary what was known as the "Europa Plan" - a suspension of deportations to concentration camps.
April, 1944: The first installment of 3 million Pengos (Hungarian currency equalling about $92,000) is delivered by Kasztner to close associates of Adolph Eichmann.
April 21, 1944: Kasztner delivers the balance of the $200,000 demanded as downpayment on the "Europa Plan."
An offer is presented to allow the 600 holders of Palestine immigration certificates to leave Hungary and to permit an additional 100 to leave with them if Kasztner can provide a per capita payment of 100,000 Pengos (about $3,000 a head).
April 25, 1944: Eichmann enters the negotiation process, inviting Joel Brand to be with him.  Eichmann offers to "sell" one million Jews in exchange for certain goods to be obtained outside of Hungary.
        10,000 trucks
        200 tons of tea
        800 tons of coffee
        2 million cases of soap
        unspecified amount of tungsten
May 15, 1944: Mass deportations of Hungarian Jews to concentration camps begin.
May 27, 1944: Kasztner, his wife, Hansi Brand, Sholem Offenbach, treasurer of the Vaada, and his wife were arrested by the Hungarian police.  Hansi Brand was beaten so savagely that she could not stand for a week.  Six days  after their arrest, the group was freed through the intervention of the SS.
June 10, 1944: 388 Jews (out of 18,000 in the Kolozsvar ghetto) were brought to Budapest on a special train and placed in a "privileged camp" built in the courtyard of the Wechselmann Institute for the Deaf on Columbus Street.
June 30, 1944: The Kasztner transport (1,685 persons) leaves Budapest.
July 8, 1944: The Kasztner transport arrives in Bergen Belsen.
July 18, 1944: Hungarian gendarmerie units arrest Kasztner and keep him incommunicado for nine days.
August 21, 1944: First meeting between Saly Mayer, Swiss representative of the Joint Distribution Committee (JDC) in Switzerland, Kasztner, and Kurt Becher on a bridge linking Switzerland and Austria.The first 318 Jews are released from Bergen Belsen and transported to Switzerland.
December 7, 1944: The second group of the Kasztner transport, consisting of 1,368 Jews, arrives in Switzerland.
In the Kasztner Report, Lanzmann feels that Kasztner seems to express some guilt.  There has been the accusation that Kasztner "saved certain people from Cluj (his own family and Zionists)."  Lanzmann asks Brand to explain how people were chosen for the transport to Bergen-Belsen (the so-called Kasztner Train rescue mission).  "She says that the types of people chosen varied greatly but included the most endangered refugees, Zionists, Jewish intellectuals, orphans, and rich people, whose wealth helped pay the $1,000 per-person ransom demanded by the Germans."  Lanzmann asks Hansi why she thinks her husband's mission to Istanbul did not succeed and she replies "that the English did not want to help the Jews because they did not want to deal with the problem of Palestine.  She says further that the Jews in Palestine were not informed as to what was happening.  She ends the interview by defending her husband against historians who say that he did not return to Budapest out of fear for himself (Joel Brand was arrested by the British in Aleppo and eventually ended up in Palestine)."
Leora Bilsky, in "Judging Evil: New Departures in Israeli Legal History," quotes the judge in the trial of Kasznter:
"The judge [. . .] derived from this contract the main explanation for Kastner's subsequent betrayal of his people: The benefit that K. gained from the contract with the Nazis was the rescue of the "camp of prominent Jews" and the price that he had to pay for this was a complete surrender of any attempts at real rescue steps benefiting the "camp of the people."  The price the Nazis paid for this was to waive the extermination of the "camp of prominents."  With this contract to save the prominent Jews, the head of the Aid and Rescue Committee made a "concession" with the exterminator: in return for the rescue of the prominent Jews K. agreed to the extermination of the people and abandoned them to their fate."

                                                   CONTINUED UNDER PART 3

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp Part 1/4‏

  BERGEN-BELSEN CONCENTRATION CAMP PART 1/4   

PROLOGUE

When British soldiers in the early afternoon of 15 April 1945 liberated the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen , they faced a picture of horror which had come as a shock to them , despite all the atrocities they had experienced during the war , what offered them were approximately 10,000 unburied corpses which lay scattered on the grounds of the camp , some already half decayed. Seeing the almost to skeleton emaciated corpses, the troops became aware, that the prisoners were not killed by gassing or shooting , but by starvation or epidemics. Even the sight of the still-living prisoners gave an idea of ​​the extent of the crimes that had been committed in this concentration camp. The liberators received hardly any cheering , rather apathy and almost disbelief . Most prisoners lacked the strength to be happy about their arrival or to express joy to be free. Some of the  inmates were already so weakened that they literally died before the eyes of the liberating soldiers.

For many prisoners, the help provided came too late. Despite the prompt onset of relief efforts of the Britons more than 13,000 former prisoners died in the first twelve weeks after the liberation from the consequences of their detention, that is about a quarter of the 55,000 prisoners who had been freed in mid-April at Bergen-Belsen. The total number of victims of the concentration camp is estimated at 50,000.

Immediately after the liberation members of a Film and Photographic Unit of the British Army began their work , what they saw themselves here with stunned horror, was captured and held in hundreds of photos and film footages. These pictures were just shortly afterwards published in newspapers, magazines and newsreels, in particular in western foreign countries, pictures with which the public was confronted quite unexpectedly, and were for many a symbol of the totality of a National Socialist  concentration camp and its systematic method of crimes committed.

THE ESTABLISHMENT OF A 'HOLDING CAMP'(AUFENTHALTSLAGER)

The history of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen began quite early but, in due course with very different aims.  At the end of 1942 leading officials of the Foreign Ministry met together with Heinrich Himmler considering similar plans , both aimed at the continuation and intensification in the exchange (Austausch) of Jews from the German sphere of influence, against German citizens abroad . Special attention was paid to Palestinian Germans  living in Palestine or the German Jews who possessed Palestinian nationality papers, Palestine certificates or family ties in the British Mandate and Jews with the corresponding relations in America. Hitler had agreed to establish such a special camp for Jews in a conversation with Himmler on December 10, 1942. Himmler ordered the Reich Security Main Office in December 1942 , that the Jews ,  "with influential relatives in America , should be concentrated into a special camp (Sonderlager) . There, they will indeed work , but under conditions that they remain healthy and stay alive . Himmler felt, "that these types of Jews are valuable hostages (Geiseln) for us. I anticipate that this would be in the figure of about 10,000".

These plans associated with similar considerations in the Foreign Office and conducted in March or at the latest, early April 1943 , Himmler ordered the establishment of a special camp for certain groups of Jewish prisoners that should be excluded from extermination, if they did possess one for the SS or the Foreign Office any " exchange value " . In return for the release of these Jews the SS and Foreign Office wanted the return of interned Germans in enemy countries or the payment of foreign exchange, to obtain the delivery of urgently needed goods. In addition,  conflicts should  be avoided with those States through the release of Jews byz neutral or friendly counties with Germany. The next question for Jewish persons qualifying, was defined as follows at the end of August 1943:

1.Jews who have familial or other relationships with influential persons in enemy countries .

2. Jews who come on the basis of a low-key, as a replacement for Reich's-Germans held as internees or prisoners in enemy countries abroad.

3. Jews that could be useful as hostages and as a political or economic leverage.

4. Jewish top officials .

As the site of this new camp, the southern half of the not fully occupied POW camp Bergen-Belsen was selected. It was set up in 1940 as a camp for Belgian and French prisoners of war in 1941, but after the German invasion of the Soviet Union in the second half of that year, thousands of Soviet POW were housed here under totally inadequate conditions. The majority of them died in the winter of 1941/42, from hunger, cold and disease. After its completion of a hospital for Soviet prisoners of war, this complex existed parallel to the concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen until its dissolution in January 1945. Overall, about 20,000 Soviet POW perished in the camp.

The here and now, the newly built special camp Bergen-Belsen was called "Civil Internment Camp" (Zivilinterniertenlager), which was changed a little later in "Residence Camp (Aufenthaltslager)." The reasoning is rather revealing: "This change is necessary because civilian internment camps come under the Geneva Convention and must be accessible to International Commissions".  Although Bergen-Belsen was restricted of its intended special functions, it was initially neither within the system of a forced labour camp for the armaments industry, nor could it be termed as a typical concentration camp. It was nevertheless controlled on the instructions of Himmler, by the Economic Administrative Main Office and thus incorporated into the system of a National Socialistic Concentration Camp , a decision that would prove to be for the later development of Bergen-Belsen as fatal,  this facilitated a fateful process of an increasing expansion in its  function in spring of 1944.

1. Bergen-Belsen was from the start a family camp, where a relatively large number of children and adolescents were housed. In general, no individuals were taken to the residence camp, but whole families, even if, for example, only a single family member met the conditions for the exchange program.

2. The living conditions in the occupied camps were much better than those in the other concentration camps: The considered hostage prisoners had to stay alive to exchange them or to release them for other considerations. They should not show abroad by their physical condition, what prevailing conditions in the National Socialistic concentration camps in fact did exist. Their substantive "privileges" also counted, they were allowed to bring all their personal baggage into Bergen-Belsen. Thus the infrastructure of the camp was designed accordingly.  No big incinerators were built, but rather a small crematorium, as it was expected for this camp that only a few deaths would occur.

3. In regard to the prisoners at Bergen-Belsen, it was unlike compared to all other concentration camps within the territory of the Reich, it was first and foremost a facility exclusively for Jews. Non-Jewish prisoners were housed initially in only one part of the complex, specified in the historiography as a "prison camp", and strictly separated from other sub-camps. Until about the end of 1944, the proportion of Jews to other inmates of Bergen-Belsen was about 80 to 90% and in the subsequent period, when the share of non-Jewish prisoners rose, the Jews remained separated and were accommodated in different parts of the camp. At the time of liberation in April 1945, the percentage of Jewish prisoners was still at about 50%

Cremation oven used in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Bergen-Belsen, Germany, April 28, 1945'. 

The first appointed  commandant was SS-Hauptsturmführer (Captain) Adolf Haas, who had previously been commander of the KZ Niederhagen at Wewelsburg, which by now was in the process of its dissolution in the spring of 1943, he was ready for a new task. With him also changed almost all SS personnel from Niederhagen to Bergen-Belsen. They formed the core of the SS men who nevertheless underwent a change in the summer of 1944 as well by replacing usefully Front Fighting  younger SS men by former members of the Wehrmacht. Further changes in the personnel composition of SS men were made by the commander himself in December 1944, with the inclusion of former members of the Auschwitz SS staff, which, as a camp was in the course of its own closure. Although Bergen-Belsen was a family camp from the beginning, the SS guards up to the winter of 1944/45 were exclusively males. 

The first major prisoner transport to Bergen-Belsen was on April 30, 1943 which came from Buchenwald, this was followed in May and June with few minor transports from there and two other concentration camps Niederhagen and Natzweiler. Overall, they were not more than about 600 prisoners, mostly Russians, Poles and Frenchmen. For them, it was not a matter to exchange prisoners (Austauschhäftlinge), rather they formed a construction detail that had the "residence camp"(Aufenthaltslager) prepared and improvements made.

PRISONER GROUPS AND STRUCTURES IN THE "TRANSIT CAMP" (AUSTAUSCHLAGER)

The first Jewish "Exchange Prisoners" arrived on the 7th July 1943,  from Warsaw . They were followed up to and until October 21, 1943 with nine other transports from Warsaw, Lvov (Lemberg) , Krakow, Bochnia and Radom. These consisted mainly of about 2,700 Polish Jews . Only about ten percent of them had Palestinian citizen certificates , but most of them were brought to Bergen-Belsen , because they had citizenship papers for Latin- American countries . Only in a few cases , however, that they were in possession of a  passport. The majority had only  "Promesas" , ie consular letters in which the future issuance of a nationality was promised . With these Promesas a flourishing trade was operating in the Jewish ghettos , partly because these papers were from  Jews , in whose name the Promesas were issued , but had long since been deported , so the Certificates now got to third parties and had been accordingly falsified.

Valid Certificate for a young boy

Upon arrival In Bergen-Belsen these papers underwent a precise control and could be termed to a de facto selection procedure, because the majority of these personal documents were not recognized by the Gestapo as authentic  and their owners were therefore sent to Auschwitz to all intents and purposes to be exterminated [the German text reads 'murdered'].  A large transport,  encompassing approximately 1,800 people left Bergen-Belsen on the 21st October 1943 and two smaller ones followed in the first half of 1944, the vast majority of this group was deported to the Auschwitz extermination camp. Only about 350 of the original 2,700 Polish prisoners group remained in Bergen-Belsen and were housed there in a separate section of the camp.

A transit station towards freedom  from Bergen-Belsen was meant for a group of 367 Sephardic Jews of Spanish nationality who were brought in mid-August 1943, from Salonika into the camp. As citizens of a neutral state in World War II they were in early February 1944 released to Spain. As prisoners, however, remained 74 Greek Jews who had been deported in August plus 155 Spanish and Portuguese Jews as well from Greece who arrived in early April 1944. [There is no reason given why the latter Jews were not repatriated, as both countries Spain and Portugal remained neutral]

While the Spanish and Portuguese Jews were housed in one department of the camp, intended for nationals of neutral states, the Greek Jews came into a new complex from which it soon developed into the largest parts of the

Residence Holding Section, called the "Star Camp" because the prisoners there had to wear on their civilian clothes the Star of David. Men and women lived in separate barracks, but members of the same family were permitted to meet. Most of the prisoners in the “star camp” were Jews from the Netherlands.

Women's 'Star Camp' (Sternlager)  at Bergen-Belsen 1945

From January to September 1944 a total of 3,670 Jewish exchange prisoners were transferred to Bergen-Belsen from the Westerbork transit camp in the Netherlands with eight transports,  and sent to those parts of the camp, in which the Greek Jews already lived and who had there already occupied the most important functional positions. The deported prisoners from Westerbork were for the most part Dutch, to a lesser extent German Jews who had fled before the outbreak of war to the Netherlands.

 In the first half of 1944  arrived in several smaller transports about 300 North African Jews in Bergen-Belsen who possessed British citizenship documents. From France, a group of Jews came to the camp, which predominantly composed of women and children whose husbands were in German Prisoner of War Camps. Added to this were several hundred Yugoslav and Albanian Jews.                

Between 1911 and 1943, Libya was an Italian colony. The Jewish population of Libya counted some 30,000 souls on the eve of WW II and while most lived in the two main cities, the capital Tripoli and in Benghazi, the rest were dispersed in many villages. With the rapprochement of Italy to Nazi Germany, the first racial laws were applied against Libyan Jews as early as 1938. Just as in occupied European countries, Jews' lives became progressively much harder. After Italy entered the war on the side of her ally Germany, all the Jewish French and British citizens were interned in Giado concentration camp situated at 240 km south of Tripoli. Cyrenaica was conquered by the British army in June 1940 and re-conquered back by the German Afrika Korps in May 1941, thus restoring Italian rule. Afterwards, the Jewish French citizens were sent to Tunisia, while the 300 Jewish British citizens were deported to several temporary internment camps in Italy. From there they were sent to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

At the end of July 1944 lived in the residence camp (Aufentaltslager) 7,300 prisoners, two thirds of them in the "star camp" that was therefore until April 1945 by far the largest figure in the occupied "Exchange Camp". A total of at least 14,600 Jewish prisoners were taken to the Residence Section(Aufentaltslager) , between July 1943 and December 1944.

They lived here not according to all the same camp rules, but were , from the perspective of the SS, treated by different jurisdiction, according to their national origin, and had been spread over a number of different sections,  first and foremost in strictly separate parts of the camp,  each with different living conditions. Men and women were housed in segregated barracks , but were able to meet during the day . The children of the prisoners until the age of 14 years , were living with their mothers . From the age of 15 the boys were moved to one of the men's barracks. The food situation was bad from the beginning , the hunger determined more and more the inmates condition and behaviour  everyday. In the Star Camp the adults were obliged to work . The largest of the labour detachments formed the "shoe commando " whose task it was to separate out from thousands of shoes the still usable leather uppers which had to be removed from the soles  . Among the most dreaded labour detachments counted the exchange commando , they had to dig outside of the camp, uprooting remaining tree stumps and had thus to collect wood .

In a special camp (Sonderlager) that held 350 Polish Jews, who had remained after the transports of their brethren to Auschwitz from Bergen-Belsen. The great majority of them held Palestinian Certificates, to a small extent they had citizenship papers of the United States or South American countries. The probably reason that they did not live in the Star Camp was,  because they were aware of the extermination of people in Poland and this should not be spread in Bergen-Belsen. Therefore, they were housed in an isolated part of the camp, nor were they used in work details outside the camp perimeter.

In the Neutral Camp (Neutrallager) more than 700 prisoners were brought in since August 1943, who had the nationality of neutral states, these Jews were in two main groups with Spanish or Turkish citizenship papers. Compared to the main camp they lived in better material conditions and were used only for internal camp work.

Block 311 of the Neutralenlager

THE HUNGARIAN CAMP was established on 8 July 1944 and held 1,684 Jews from Hungary, the transport organised by Dr Rezso (Rudolf) Kasztner. Here too, the prisoners wore their own clothes but were forced to display the yellow star.

Only a few of the Jews who were brought to Bergen-Belsen as candidates for exchange were in fact set free in exchange deals. On 10 July 1944, 222 Jews with immigration certificates to Palestine landed at the Haifa port. A few weeks later, on 21 August, 318 Jews from the “Hungarian Camp” reached Switzerland, followed by another 1,365 in December. In January 1945, 136 Jews with South American papers also reached Switzerland.

Beginning in March 1944, Bergen-Belsen gradually became a “regular” concentration camp, the Germans transferring to it prisoners from other concentrations camps who were classified as ill and unfit to work.

The first such group came in late March 1944 and consisted of 1,000 sick prisoners from the Dora camp. They were put into a new section of the camp where the sanitary conditions were extremely poor, they received no blankets, no medical attention and only minute food rations. Nearly all of them died within a short period -on the day of the camps liberation only 57 of the original 1,000 were still alive. More transports of prisoners “unfit for work” kept arriving from various camps up to the end of 1944, most of them made up of Hungarian Jews.

The majority were housed in the former “prisoners camp,” where conditions were at their worst and the mortality rate was the highest. Of the several thousand prisoners brought to this section of the camp in 1944, 820 died in the period from April to June alone.

Also transferred to this section of the camp were German convicts from the Dora camp, who were appointed “block elders” and Kapos, who treated the Jewish prisoners under their authority with great brutality, and caused a great number of cruel deaths.

The prisoners also suffered from the sadistic practices of the camp doctor, Obersturmführer Dr Karl Jäger, who forced them to keep running for long stretches of time. In the summer of 1944 some 200 prisoners were killed by phenol injections.

In August 1944 a new section was added, to serve as a women’s camp, consisting of twelve barracks, 4,000 Jewish women prisoners from Hungary and Poland were brought there, but after a short stay they were sent to Buchenwald and Flossenburg camps, to perform forced labour. Most of the women returned to Bergen-Belsen sick or exhausted by the hard labour that they had been forced to do.

In September and October 1944 transports of Jewish prisoners from the Plaszow camp, near Krakow, and 3,000 Jewish women prisoners from Auschwitz arrived in Bergen-Belsen, they were housed in the “star camp,” in new barracks put up for them, with no water, no beds, and no other facilities of any kind.

Among these prisoners were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who both died in March 1945 from the typhus epidemic that raged through the camp.

Grave site of Anne Frank and sister Margot'. This is actually a memorial only, as both had been burried oin a mass grave

 On 2 December 1944 Adolf Haas the camp commandant was replaced by Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Kramer. A census taken on 2 December 1944 showed that the camp population was 15,257 persons, of whom some 8,000 were women.

Kramer’s first step was to convert Bergen- Belsen officially into a concentration camp, the residues of self-administration that still existed in the “star camp” were abolished, and the internal management of the camp was put into the hands of the “block elders” and Kapos, as was done in all other concentration camps.

A final and complete deterioration of the prisoners living conditions set in when tens of thousands of prisoners poured in – survivors of the death marches who had been evacuated from the camps in the east. These included 20,000 women prisoners from the Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camps who had passed through the Gross- Rosen concentration camp on the death march to Bergen-Belsen.

In the period from January to March 1945 there were more death marches which brought thousands of male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald concentration camps to Bergen-Belsen.

The camp administration did nothing to house the prisoners who were streaming in. Most of them had no roof over their heads, and were without water and food. There was now total chaos in Bergen-Belsen and a typhus epidemic broke out, in the month of March alone 18,168 prisoners perished in the camp and the number of deaths for the period from January to mid-April 1945 was 35,000.

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp September 1944'

Despite its special function compared to other concentration camps as a temporary stay,(Aufenthaltslager) camp Bergen-Belsen from the outset was a place of suffering and humiliation. So Heinrich Hermann writes about the obligation to work in early 1944: "The age limit for compulsory labour fluctuated. In January 1944, the most severe months, they had even 75- and 80-year-old men work hard in wind and weather. This was a cruelty, through which many people have perished".

Although for the SS in Bergen-Belsen direct mistreatment of exchange prisoners was prohibited, a ban that was not always noted this but numerous harassment by the SS were at the mercy of arbitrary individual or collective bread withdrawal for one or more days up to the "fence standing "a kind of individual criminal appeal. Some prisoners were forced to stand in the latrine and to clean them with bare hands. The so-typical concentration camp ordeal of standing appeal, which was arbitrarily extended by the SS of, was also in Bergen-Belsen to the everyday life of the prisoners. "On Friday, February 11, 1944 Women and children stood for 9 hours in snow and ice," wrote S.H. Herman later.

" Bergen- Belsen " -  was  synonym of hunger and for the exchange-prisoners a daily occurrence right from the beginning. This became more and more of an all-determining , always life threatening appearance. On 4 September 1944 Hanna Levy-Hass noted in her diary : "Our shack is a real madhouse (Irrenhaus) . Only a few are able to control themselves . The slightest incident gives rise to quarrels , to insults, threats and often fights . All are highly irritable, always ready to get carried away and to see in their neighbour her personal enemy . The distrust, dishonesty, it would sneak into all hearts , as well as suspicion , that will leave one tremble . What a disaster. The unhappy faces , in which terror , hunger and animal behaviour of fear can be read.   Especially at the food counter . Everyone has to watch herself as the Kapo fills his bowl to two thirds with a big ladle from the soup kettle which is drained to the bottom, but often fought over what might be still at the bottom of the cauldron .With expressions like a brutalized bunch, and tears in their eyes of those who fear not to receive their ration.

Prisoners being given food at Plaszow forced labour camp, 

And under the date of 23 October 1944, she writes about bread rations: "The rations are getting  smaller from week to week. The daily ration are measured with tape measure, which often amounts to only 3.5 centimeters. One trembles to this piece like it would be gold. You cut it carefully, with reverence, into pieces of one or two millimeters thick. It is almost a tragedy when a ration is stolen or if you will be punished for any reason, or no reason, with the withdrawal of one or two rations of bread". 

The rapidly proliferating vermin and the ever-expanding diseases were living in Bergen-Belsen unbearable for an ever larger share of the prisoners. Again H. Levy- Hass: " The little children suffered from specific diseases. A very small adorable girl of four years is lying for five weeks in bed. She has febrile seizures. The whole body is covered with boils. When her mother lifts her up from the bed , her head falls obliquely onto her shoulder, she no longer has the strength to hold it straight . She observes its surroundings with an intelligent , sensible , rather resigned look . Only her big , wonderful eyes still live in a fleshless face. And when her little body is once stripped , she is just a skeleton that is still alive that breathes , which suffers in silence. Without crying and screaming . She has no longer the strength to do so. Today, this morning, the boils have to be opened, this is terrible , so much pus. She only sobbed a little bit , and the rest of the time she remained silent , motionless ".  (No indication of her final fate is given)

 APPENDIX 

    As British forces approached Bergen-Belsen, German authorities sought to turn over the camp to the British so that it would not become a combat zone. After some negotiation, it was peacefully transferred, with an agreement that "both British and German troops will make every effort to avoid battle in the area." 

A revealing account of the circumstances under which the British took control appeared in a 1945 issue of The Journal of the American Medical Association:

By negotiations between British and German officers, British troops took over from the SS and the Wehrmacht the task of guarding the vast concentration camp at Belsen, a few miles northwest of Celle, which contains 60,000 prisoners, many of them political. This has been done because typhus is rampant in the camp and it is vital that no prisoners be released until the infection is checked. The advancing British agreed to refrain from bombing or shelling the area of the camp, and the Germans agreed to leave behind an armed guard which would be allowed to return to their own lines a week after the British arrival.

The story of the negotiations is curious. Two German officers presented themselves before the British outposts and explained that there were 9,000 sick in the camp and that all sanitation had failed. They proposed that the British should occupy the camp at once, as the responsibility was international in the interests of health. In return for the delay caused by the truce the Germans offered to surrender intact the bridges over the river Aller. After brief consideration the British senior officer rejected the German proposals, saying it was necessary that the British should occupy an area of ten kilometers round the camp in order to be sure of keeping their troops and lines of communication away from the disease. The British eventually took over the camp.

On April 15, 1945, Belsen's commanders turned over the camp to British troops, who lost no time mistreating the SS camp personnel. The Germans were beaten with rifle butts, kicked, and stabbed with bayonets. Most were shot or worked to death. 

British journalist Alan Moorehead described the treatment of some of the camp personnel shortly after the takeover:

As we approached the cells of the SS guards, the [British] sergeant's language become ferocious. "We had had an interrogation this morning," the captain said. 'I'm afraid they are not a pretty sight.' ... The sergeant unbolted the first door and ... strode into the cell, jabbing a metal spike in front of him. "Get up," he shouted. "Get up. Get up, you dirty bastards." There were half a dozen men lying or half lying on the floor. One or two were able to pull themselves erect at once. The man nearest me, his shirt and face spattered with blood, made two attempts before he got on to his knees and then gradually on to his feet. He stood with his arms stretched out in front of him, trembling violently.

"Come on. Get up," the sergeant shouted [in the next cell]. The man was lying in his blood on the floor, a massive figure with a heavy head and bedraggled beard ... "Why don't you kill me?" he whispered. "Why don't you kill me? I can't stand it any more." The same phrases dribbled out of his lips over and over again. "He's been saying that all morning, the dirty bastard," the sergeant said

 After a military trial, the former Bergen-Belsen Commandant Josef Kramer in British captivity was put to death.

Commandant Kramer, who was vilified in the British and American press as "The Beast of Belsen" and "The Monster of Belsen," was put on trial and then executed, along with chief physician Dr. Fritz Klein and other camp officials. At his trial, Kramer's defense attorney, Major T.C.M. Winwood, predicted: "When the curtain finally rings down on this stage Josef Kramer will, in my submission, stand forth not as 'The Beast of Belsen' but as 'The Scapegoat of Belsen'."                                                                                                                                       

                                                                                                                                                      CONTINUED UNDER PART 2/4

MAJDANEK - LUBLIN CONCENTRATION CAMP PART 8

LEGAL PENALTIES
The criminal prosecution of members of the SS-Staff Members of the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek began already during the war. From 27 November to 2 December 1944, the first trial was held in Lublin. The charges were for participation in the mistreatment and murder of prisoners, four members of the camp SS and two German Kapos were responsible and had to defend the charges. One of the accused committed suicide, the others were sentenced to death and hanged in public on December 3, 1944 on the grounds of the former camp.

The execution of war criminals who had served on the staff of the Majdanek camp

 In the years 1946 to 1949 further trials were held in Lublin,  of the former concentration camp personnel. Around 100 members of the camp, primarily guards, who had been arrested in Germany by the Allied Occupation Authorities were extradited to Poland. The majority of defendants were members of the SS, but there were also others accused of certain crimes in rare cases. Two thirds of them were sentenced. 14 defendants to death, one defendant to life imprisonment, 20 defendants were sentenced to ten years, and about 40 former camp staff received the loss of "Freedom" and  imprisoned from five to ten years. Under the condemn was also the Oberaufseherin (Female Supervisor) of the women concentration camp, Else Ehrlich, who was executed 1948 for the Beihilfe (assistance) of murder. In the early postwar years,  members of the crew of the SS concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek were also convicted at other Allied and Polish Tribunals. In  1947 a trial against 40 members of the Concentration Camp Auschwitz took place in Krakow. During these proceedings some Functionaries  of Majdanek have been made accountable for their crimes and behaviour. Erich Mußfeld, the crematoria boss, and Arthur Liebehenschel, the Commandant, were sentenced to death, three guards were sentenced to several years in prison. In the trial of the camp occupation of the Dachau concentration camp in 1945 the Commander Weiß, storage engineer Frederick W. Ruppert and the SS Medical Orderly Anton Enders were sentenced to death. A year later, the death sentence was imposed on the notorious prison camp leader Anton Thumann and the SS doctor Alfred Trzebinski because of the crimes committed in Neuengamme concentration camp for crimes committed there.

Paul Hoffmann, an SS man on the staff of the Majdanek camp, beeing taken to his execution.'

In 1960, the Central Office of the Regional Judicial Administration in Ludwigsburg (Germany) launched investigations to the facts in Majdanek, which ended with a sensational ending, the so-called Majdanek process, and had to be retried before the District Court of Düsseldorf (1975-1981). In the dock sat 15 people, including six women. Hermine Ryan-Braunsteiner, Rapport leader in women's concentration camp, was convicted of their guilt to a life imprisonment, while seven other accused for aiding in the murder of prisoners, received terms of between three and twelve years,  the rest were acquitted. A total of about 170 members of the Command-Staff and Guards of the concentration camp Majdanek had been put on trial after the war.

Former SS-Obersturmbannfuehrer Anton Thernes (standing, left) in front of a penal court on trial for crimes committed at Majdanek, 1944, Poland'.

ELSE EHRLICH
Lizzie Frieda Else Ehrich was a German SS guard in several concentration camps . After her completion of her school career she was working in a butcher shop. She volunteered for service as a guard at the Ravensbrück concentration camp and graduated the course there from August 15th 1940. At first she worked as a supervisor of  block 13 until she was promoted in the summer of 1942 as Rapport Leader. In mid-October 1942, she was sent to Majdanek, where she after a short time acted as Oberaufseherin. Ehrich took part at the selection for the gas chambers. During the evacuation of Majdanek she came to the Plaszow concentration camp and after its evacuation in September 1944 to Neuengamme , where she worked until April 1945. After the war, Ehrich was in May 1945 arrested by members of the British Army in Hamburg and initially detained in internment at Neumünster. Soon after, she was brought into the war camp PWE 29 to Dachau, where she shared a cell with Maria Mandl. On November 22, 1946 Ehrich was extradited to Poland for the Lublin-Majdanek process on June 10, 1948, accused of her involvement in the selections process in Majdanek and of ill-treatment of detainees in both concentration camps Majdanek and Ravensbruck and sentenced to death by the rope on the 26 October 1948.
THE FIGURES OF DEATH VICTIMS AT LUBLIN-MAJDANEK
The first estimates of the number of victims of Majdanek were the result of the work of the Polish-Soviet Investigative Commission, which had been founded in August 1944. They were guided in determining the losses more for propaganda motives than of scientific interest. Furthermore they went from the  wrong assumptions about the length of the existence of the camp and the capacity of the gas chambers and the crematoria ovens . On this basis, members of the commission came to the conclusion that at Majdanek, about 1.5 million people had come to their deaths .
Four years later, the judge Zdzislaw Lukaszewicz published a detailed article about the Majdanek camp. The author distinguished  four phases of the camp's existence, due to the differing numbers of inmates during these periods. He also took into account the fact that due to improved living conditions and the help of charitable organizations, which significantly reduced the mortality rate from the second half of 1943. However, he increased again, without any source document, the number of deported prisoners, the death toll of the unregistered prisoners and the average number of prisoners living in the camp at anyone time. In some cases, he used incorrectly calculated indicators of the mortality rate. According to his calculations, 360,000 people perished in the camp, including 200,000 registered prisoners. The largest groups among the victims were Jews (200,000) and Poles (100,000).
The results of Lukaszewicz went permanently into the historiography of Majdanek, and are still accepted in scientific publications and reference works both in Poland and abroad. Tatiana Berenstein and Adam Rutkowski, already figured the number of Jewish victims at Majdanek at 120,000,  that are 80,000 less than Lukaszkiewicz. However, this did not lead to a revision of his calculations, which is partly due to the fact that until the 1990s in the 20th century, the prisoner mortality in the concentration camp Lublin was not a subject of historical studies in depth, and are even now published of events that took place at that time in many important publications.
The difficulties which presented a balance of victims perished at Majdanek, demonstrates the wide-ranging investigation that led the West German judiciary in the years 1960 until 1974. They collected 25,000 pages of evidence that were used later in the process in Düsseldorf (1975-1981). In the court's opinion, we read: "On the total number of inmates perished in Majdanek [...] in the evidence we adduced, how many people died, we have no accurate idea. At least 200,000 victims, including at least 60,000 Jewish people, the circuit court chamber considers this figure as certain ".
A twist in the research on the death toll of the concentration camp Lublin came in 1992, as Czeslaw Rajca presented new figures, by the number of those subtracted from the total amount of prisoners who were released or were transferred to other camps. He came to the conclusion that approximately 235,000 people died in Majdanek, including 110,000 Jews and 123,000 non-Jewish prisoners, mainly Poles. It should be emphasized that these findings are estimates only that can not be confirmed by archived material.
Given the lack of well-based statistics on the total number of prisoners, subject to all attempts to create a balance of Majdanek victims by comparing the To- and Off- transported people, a high risk of discrepancies still exists . In contrast,  the story in the case of "Deportations of Jews", which are occupied for the most part in the sources or have been proven by scientific work, we now know, for example, since 2001 , when a decoded, intercepted radio message from Hermann Höfle , the Leader of the Staff of the "Action Rheinhardt " was  discovered that in the year 1942,  24.733 Jews died in Majdanek . However, we have to rely on estimates for some transports as such as before . The error rate moves in the order of several thousand. Starting from this assumption, results of these calculations of the author that about 74,000 prisoners marked with the Star of David were transported to Majdanek . 15,000 of them were transferred to other camps. Consequently, in the concentration camp Majdanek about 60,000 Jewish men, women and children were exterminated. [The German text reads "murdered".HKS]
On Author's calculations of the number of non-Jewish victims were based among other things on preserved archival documents, in which deaths of prisoners are registered or recorded. A particular source is the value of death books (1,940 names) which are obtained for the period from May to September 1942 (6,701 names) and from March to early 1944, as well as the copy of the register of deaths for the period from 20 November 1942 to January 21, 1943 (1,924 deaths). Apart from Jewish prisoners a total of about 19,000 people of different nationalities died in Majdanek, among them mainly Poles and Belarusians. Based on this research, a total of 78,000 people lost their lives in the concentration camp Lublin-Majdanek.

FINAL

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Sources:
Der Ort des Terrors Vol. 7
Konzentrationslager Lublin-Majdanek
Researcher-Author: Tomasz Kranz
C.H.Beck oHG, München 2008.
Wikipedia, Methapedia.
Vetted by:
Institute for Research on Anti-Semitism-Berlin.
Translated from German and French by:
Herbert Stolpmann, May 2014.
HKS: Own initials, when expression
my opinion.
[sic] transcribed exactly as found
in the original source.
Editing/Design:
d_stolpmann@hotmail.com
Sponsors:
a)Cultural Department of the
Federal Republic of Germany
c)The Foreign Office of Germany
b)Alfred Krupp Foundation

MAJDANEK - LUBLIN CONCENTRATION CAMP PART 7

EVACUATION AND RESOLUTION OF MAJDANEK
In May and June 1942 prisoners were first deported from the Lublin concentration camp to other camps: 1,400 Jews were placed by the SS in two transports to Auschwitz. Among them was Walter Rosenberg, who, along with other authors wrote a famous report on the crimes in Auschwitz after his escape under the pseudonym as Rudolf Vrba. However, the transport movements between Majdanek and other camps intensified only in the year 1943, when the demand for labour rose in the camps of the inner Reich, which were employed in the production of armament production (Rüstungsproduktion). The transfers from Majdanek had already taken place during the year 1943/44,  in the context of the gradual evacuation of the camp. By the end of March 1944 a total of approximately 20,000 registered prisoners and several thousand temporarily detained Polish farmers (Bauern) were deported from the concentration camp Lublin. [Himmler was convinced that after Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943), Germany had lost the war, and took up clandestine negotiation via Sweden for an end of hostilities with Western Allies. This was one of the reason he was killed in captivity (he never took poison) by an British Agent, most likely Robert Bruce-Lockhart, as he, Himmler, would have embarrassed the Tribunal during the Nürnberg-Trials, HKS] In early November 1943, the Germans worked out a plan for the evacuation of Lublin. This foresaw the destruction of important buildings, especially military installations, using time bombs. In the proposal there were 22 objectives to achieve, in the last paragraph, the concentration camp Lublin was mentioned with the remark that the camp was to be  destroyed by arson which should be carried out in different places.

Remnants of the ovens at Majdanek'

From autumn of 1943 rumours were circulating of a liquidation of the camp among the prisoners . First, they feared that all would be shot. As of January 1944 they seemed to believe that deportation into the camps of the Reich a more realistic alternative . At that time, the Eastern Front was still far away. The evacuation of the German officials (Beamte) of the Lublin district was first intimated on the March 19, 1944 , when one of the bridge-heads at the city of Kovel in the Ukraine a distant of 250 kiilomtre from Lublin was reached by the Red Army. The commander of Majdanek then asked the Berlin authorities for instructions . After the WVHA had ordered the evacuation of the camp , they started with the first preparations : The prisoner card files were sorted , a portion of the barracks were removed and the magazines emptied . The camp office was preparing transport lists for the deportations . The able-bodied prisoners were sent to the camps in the Reich territory , a large proportion of patients went to the Auschwitz concentration camp .

'The ruins of one of the Majdanek camp building'

Mid- March 1944 there lived more than 9,000 prisoners at Majdanek , the prisoners of war in the military hospital camp are not included. Almost half of them was sick, many of them beyond help . From March to 6 April 1944 1,940 deaths were registered in the camp . Taking into account the date of the first and last evacuation transport from Majdanek, it can be assumed that the camp was four months in a state of evacuation. Most of the prisoners , however, were taken away in the first three weeks of April 1944. 1,150 detainees had been transferred to the concentration camp Natzweiler , half of them were immediately trams-shipped to Bergen-Belsen. About 800 people are deported to the concentration camp Gross-Rosen , 600 came to Plaszow , and 900 female prisoners were brought to the concentration camp Ravensbrück. For over 4,600 prisoners the concentration camp Auschwitz was their End-Station, how many survived out of this consignment is not recorded. Only 200 prisoners remained as a clearing up commando in Majdanek. Later, several hundred Jews came from the Lublin evacuated satellite camps  in Budzyn and Blizyn  to assist them.
The farmers from the Lublin region and Soviet prisoners of war who were not de facto prisoners, were still detained at the end of the camp period in Majdanek. The evacuation transports were resumed prior to  Soviet units just two to three weeks before taking over the camp in July . On 7 July, a part of the Soviet war-wounded were evacuated : 1,250 POW's were sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp. The final evacuation took place on 22 July 1944 but had to leave on foot instead . On this day,  about 800 people left the camp, which were complemented outside Lublin city , with more than 200 other prisoners from the sub-camp at Lopowa Sraße . This transport reached on July 28, 1944 Auschwitz, where 837 people were included in the camp registration. The other prisoners had either managed to flee from the transport, or they died on the march. [From what I observed by a Death March of women inmates , guarded by older Wehrmacht guards , they were of the opinion, the more escaped , the better for us . Their answer was: " What do you think will happen to me when the Russians catch up with us ?" There were indeed dead bodies on the roadside, when we proceeded with our mission HKS ]

The Aftermath

In the last hours of its existence the Majdanek card files and records of the camp were burned by the personnel of the orderly room . Part of the documents , the SS had already destroyed earlier , including the official recognition index with photos and fingerprints of several thousand prisoners. According to the original plan  the bonfire in parts had begun. The German report on the defence of Lublin reported: "The accommodated  Polish civilians and the Polish labour service were released by order of the Senior Field Commander , as the KZ camp is already on fire".  In the rush, the camp crew did not manage to destroy a large number of buildings. It burned only the wooden superstructure of the crematorium. On 24 July 1944, Lublin was under the control of one Belarusian-Front and units of the Polish Home Army ( Armia Krajowa ) . The advancing Soviet soldiers found there in the camp about 1,000 of their former comrades in arms, who had not been evacuated from the military hospital for Soviet war invalids, but this was not the last stage of their demise. The fate of captured Russian POW's was [Stalin's last tragic act in his purging of the military were the accusations of betrayal and treachery he advanced in the summer of 1941 against the Western Front commanders, Pavlov and Klimovskikh, and several other generals among whom, as it became clear later, there were also people who behaved in an uncompromising way to the end when in captivity." This is the assessment by the famous chronicler of the war, Konstantin Simonov. It appeared in the 1960s, but during the wartime ordeals there was indomitable faith: the prisoners of war (both generals and soldiers) were guilty. Most were interned in Gulags for re-Education in Siberia. No other yardstick existed as Stalin's Order No. 270". Commenting on that order, Stalin declared: "There are no Soviet prisoners of war, only traitors. sic]
After the liberation of Majdanek, the Red Army rebuilt some of the camp barracks into a Garrison, and part of the Polish Army was stationed there as well. In August 1944, the Soviets established on one of the  fields an NKVD camp, and interned for some weeks Polish soldiers as well as the Farmers Working Battalions as they were basically in opposition as members of the Armia Krajowa,  to the communist authorities. They were later deported to Siberia. Short term, they brought former German prisoners of war into the barracks, this was parallel when the 'Documentation Work' began, named the "Polish-Soviet Extraordinary Commission for the study of German crimes in the extermination camp Majdanek in Lublin", interrogated numerous witnesses and conducted field visits, where they made detailed reports and sketches. They also submitted an application to build a museum on the camp grounds.

The Polish - Soviet commission investigating crimes at the Majdanek camp'

In autumn 1944 the State Museum at Majdanek started its activity. This institution was created under extremely difficult conditions, which were a result of the takeover by the Communists in Poland. By the fall of 1945, almost the entire camp remained under the control of the Russian military, and had no intentions to prevent not only numerous depredations and thefts, but also participated themselves to the destruction of the camp relics. The Soviet soldiers fell not only on features of the camp, but also destroyed or retained a  large portion of the documents from the offices of the camp.

'Building No. 41, that housed the gas chambers in the Majdanek camp'.

The work of the museum in the first two decades has focused on the development and preservation of the historic fabric as well as enlightening, and generic works. The research only began in the 1960s, it is to this day still going on.


APPENDIX-Heinrich Himmler:
On May 23, 1945 Britain's secret agents had secretly and criminally liquidated one of the most wanted men in history, for whose proper public trial and punishment the blood of millions of his victims cried out.
British secret service did murder SS chief Heinrich Himmler (to stop him talking to the Americans)
NOTE: About the authenticity of these new Himmler Documents, documents discovered in Britain's Public Records Office, Kew, London, confirm revisionist claims that Himmler was liquidated by the British secret service on Churchill's orders, and did not commit suicide shortly after his capture as conformist historians have long maintained.
David Irving writes: -
Winston Churchill had long agitated in his War Cabinet for a secret plan to be approved between the Allied leaders ordering the execution without trial of a number of the enemy leaders, including Himmler. See my book "Nuremberg, the Last Battle" and the forthcoming volume iii of the Churchill biography.
Meeting at Hyde Park in September 1944, Churchill had readily persuaded Franklin D Roosevelt to sign on to this plan for lynch justice, but after Churchill carried the document to Moscow in October 1944 Joseph Stalin surprisingly refused to agree, insisting instead on proper trials for all enemy war criminals.

                                           
                                             Churchill and Assistant

David Irving recalls:
IN 1999 my publishing imprint Focal Point Publications invited Californian writer Joe Bellinger to speak at Cincinnati on The Strange Death of Heinrich Himmler. He came to the same conclusions. Impressed by his narrative there we paid him over $11,000 to enable him to travel to Washington and London to complete his research. He never made those trips, never finished his manuscript, and unfortunately did not learn of the files which have now been released.
The "silencing" of Himmler raises again the question of whether Churchill really had been negotiating with Himmler for nearly a year. In August 1944 the head of the secret service showed him at least one document "from Himmler," and Churchill assured the secret service chief that after reading it he had safely destroyed it: 'Himmler telegram was kept and destroyed by me. WSC.31.viii'.
Hitler was evidently aware of what Himmler was up to, because on September 12 the Reichsführer discussed with Hitler "peace feelers to Russia or Britain." A few days later, however, on September 18, 1944, the British intercepted a German intelligence signal that Himmler 'forbids by W/T (wireless traffic) all contact with English since their offers are bluff' -- as no doubt they were. See PRO file HW.1/3196.
Rumours emerged last year (2004) that Churchill had personally ordered the alleged silencing of Benito Mussolini, and that the order had been handed by an SOE officer to Italian partisans soon after. Mussolini and his entire Cabinet were liquidated by machine gun squads without trial in the closing days of the war.
In April 1945, Himmler moved to northern Germany and began negotiations through his own Intelligence chief Walter Schellenberg and Count Bernadotte, the Swedish emissary, to end the bloodshed in Europe. The negotiations went through Sir Victor Mallet, the British minister in Stockholm. Stalin was by this time pathologically suspicious of any separate negotiations between the Allied governments and the Nazi leadership. Himmler was thus the repository of some awkward secrets when he fell into British hands in May 1945. For a while Churchill was inclined to deal with him. Admiral Cunningham, Britain's First Sea Lord, visited Churchill on April 13, 1945 and wrote this startling passage in his diary afterwards:
"During our interview the PM mentioned that Himmler appeared to be trying to show that he wasn't so bad as painted & PM said if it would save further expenditure of life he would be prepared to spare even Himmler. I suggested there were plenty of islands he could be sent to. "Real historians have long doubted the conformist version of how Himmler died, namely that he obligingly swallowed poison when he realised the game was up. Patient research revealed that the official files on his death had oddities, discrepancies, and inconsistencies: the autopsy performed on the corpse did not give the cause of death; a vital page had been retyped; there was no message in the files of 21 Army Group, Field-Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery's headquarters, reporting the event to London. Whatever had been there, it had gone. Now come documents from the Public Record Office (record group FO 800, file 868), which provide more than just a smoking gun. What is truly extraordinary is not so much that the conformists have willingly overlooked the inconsistencies for over sixty years but that those involved in, or aware of, the murder -- who included Prime Minister Churchill himself -- had kept quiet about it.
The documents:
May 10, 1945: The first, dated May 10, 1945 is a Personal and Secret letter on Foreign Office stationery from Sir John Wheeler-Bennett, later a noted Establishment and Royal historian, to the famous British agent Sir Robert Bruce-Lockhart, of the Political Intelligence Department of the Foreign office -- which conducted Black propaganda against the enemy:
'Further to our meeting yesterday morning, I have been giving some serious thought to the little H situation'.
We cannot allow Himmler to take to the stand in any prospective prosecution, or indeed allow him to be interrogated by the Americans. Steps will therefore have to been taken to eliminate him as soon as he falls into our hands'.

Document on the alleged silencing of Heinrich Himmler'

Please give this matter some thought, as if we are to take action we will have to expedite such an act with some haste.
Lockhart minuted two days later in handwriting: "I agree, I have arranged for Mr Ingrams to go for a fortnight. R B-L, 12/May/1945."
It is significant to note from the diary of General Dempsey, commanding the British Second Army in Northern Germany (PRO file WO/285/12), that on Monday, May 21 he visited both the detention camp at Westertimke and the German concentration area between Bremervörde and Stade. We know that Himmler and his two adjutants Macher and Grothmann had been arrested at Bremervörde on May 21, 1945, but -- so the story goes -- Himmler was not identified until they arrived at Westertimke on May 23, 1945.
The former Reichsführer SS was carrying a letter to Field Marshal Sir Bernard Montgomery, the British field commander (which has vanished). His only cyanide capsule was found in his clothing after he had been ordered to strip naked, and it was handed to Michael Murphy, head of British Illustrated London NewsIntelligence at the Second Army. According to The Illustrated London News story a few days later, a "second" capsule was surrendered to the medical officer at Himmler's final destination, the ominous house at No. 31a Ülzener Strasse in Lüneburg -- which raises a number of obvious questions.
House of death after his identification, according to the official accounts, Himmler had answered questions, eaten a thick British Army sandwich, and been driven to the house in Lüneburg -- from which he emerged dead.
Although the British military files appear meticulous, even listing with suspicious detail every person present in the room at the moment of death, many facts did not fit into place.
The prisoner's nose had been broken, according to The Illustrated London News artist who sketched the body. How had he obtained the cyanide capsule he had allegedly been hiding in his mouth (let alone answer questions and bite into that sandwich)?

                              

        Heinrich Himmler after his alleged suicide on May 23, 1945 while in British custody
The photo above was sent to me (Further Glory) by Gasan, a reader of my blog, who believes that Himmler was murdered and that the photo above shows that Himmler’s nose had been broken.  Heinrich Himmler was captured by British troops on May 21, 1945 and was “silenced permanently” .
Source: Scrapbook Pages, dated: January 11,2011,http://furtherglory.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/himmlers-death-suicide-or-murder/

The capsule descriptions varied, and bore no resemblance to what the standard issue capsule actually looked like. And more (but wait for my upcoming Himmler biography).

May 24, 1945At 2:50 a.m. that night (it was now May 24, 1945) "Mr Thomas" wired from Bremen to the Foreign Office for Bruce Lockhart in a top secret code (jj jj jj jj is the clue: it was a one-time pad).
"Further to my orders we successfully intercepted H.H. last night at Lüneburg before he could be interrogated. As instructed action was taken to silence him permanently. I issued orders that my presence at Lüneburg is not to be recorded in any fashion, and we may conclude that the H.H. problem is ended."
Bruce Lockhart significantly noted on this telegram, "copy to PM" -- i.e., to Churchill -- "May 25".
Brendan Bracken, Churchill's obnoxious red-headed confidant (left, with friend: Clementine loathed him), was also in on the action -- a war crime, despite Heinrich Himmler's dark record, as he was a prisoner of war who had surrendered to British custody.
May 27, 1945"Mr Dear Top," he wrote on May 27 to Lord Selborne at the Ministry of Economic warfare, head of the SOE (PRO file HS series HS8/944),
"Further to the good news of the death of Little H, I feel it is imperative that we maintain a complete news blackout on the exact circumstances of this most evil man's demise. I am sure that if it were to become public knowledge that we had had a hand in this man's demise, it would have devastating repercussions for this country's standing. "Quite so: Britain's secret agents had secretly and criminally liquidated one of the most wanted men in history, for whose proper public trial and punishment the blood of millions of his victims cried out: and for no other visible reason than to conceal that for a few days toward the end of the war, Churchill had negotiated with him on peace terms.

"I am also sure [continued Bracken] that this incident would complicate our relationship with our American brethren; under no circumstances must they discover that we eradicated 'Little H', particularly so since we know they were keen to interrogate him themselves.
I am of the opinion that the special SOE/PWE Committee and team can now be dissolved, even though Mallet is still negotiating with W.S. [Walter Schellenberg] in Sweden. Perhaps you could let me know your opinion on this matter."
Real historians will now need to do further work to identify the murderer, "Mr Thomas," and the part played by Robert Bruce-Lockhart, who was a principal figure in Britain's Black propaganda war together with Sefton Delmer. Bracken ordered that all his papers be destroyed before his death. Bruce-Lockhart's diaries and papers are in the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, California; a sanitized edition of his diaries was published many years ago, and his papers have probably been weeded too.
It is known that when Himmler first established contact with the British, Churchill's initial response was to deal with him regardless of his reputation. But then the secret services stepped in. A fake communiqué was issued claiming that Himmler had offered to betray Hitler, and this caused much confusion and fury in Hitler's bunker in the last few days -- not to mention anguish to Himmler himself.
Until the last moment, he believed that he was to meet Montgomery, and when he took off his eye patch and identified himself as Himmler to the British camp commandant, he believed that he would be in the presence of the British commander soon after. Instead, as Colonel Michael Murphy wrote in a handwritten report in an odd turn of phrase to which we drew comment two months later, "I therefore told him to dress, and wishing to have a medical search conducted, telephoned my G-II at my H.Q. and told him to get a Doctor to stand by at a house I had had prepared for such men as Himmler." This was the house from which Himmler emerged lifeless, wrapped in a blanket.

House of Himmlers murder'

Many months ago we had already detected that page 2 of the three-page report in the British Second Army intelligence unit's war diary, recording Himmler's death, had been retyped at roughly headlined the same time -- on the same report pad and using the same typewriter, but by a different hand: clearly indicating that it had been sanitized for some purpose which could only be surmised.
Now we know why.
Radical's Diary No.26: " I noticed that page 2 of the 1945 Second Army diary, which relates this episode at length, has been retyped on the same typewriter as used for pages 1 and 3, but by a different typist."
Illustrated London News runs early story on the "suicide" of Himmler. "Sergeant Carl Sutton," or "Norman Redford" took illicit photos of the body. Description in Feb 1964 by former colonel (British Army) Michael Murphy on the death of Heinrich Himmler, May 1945, written to biographer Heinrich Fraenkel.Selkirk Panton writes (May 1954) on Himmler's end. Sunday Times publishes new Hitler, Himmler photos. War diary on death of Himmler, and Substance of Message from GS9 2.
[Above is a partial translation from French]

 CONTINUED UNDER PART 8