“That which has happened is a warning. To forget it is guilt. It must be continually remembered. It was possible for this to happen, and it remains possible for it to happen again at any minute. Only in knowledge can it be prevented” (Karl Jaspers, German philosopher and anti-Nazi)
This week marks the 80th anniversary of the Durham Light Infantry reaching the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on 18 April 1945.
On 12 April 1945 the British 2nd Army was able to break into Germany after the Rhine crossing and 8 Corps was approached by the German military commander at Bergen-Belsen with a view to negotiating a truce and avoiding a battle in the area of the Belsen concentration camp.
There were thought to be 45 to 55,000 internees in the concentration camp of whom a very large number were reported to be suffering from typhus, typhoid, tuberculosis and gastro-enteritis. There was no bread and very little food and the electricity and water supply had failed. There was also in occupation of the area 800 Wehrmacht ,1 500 Hungarians with their wives and families and certain SS prison guards.
It was a regiment affiliated to the Durham Light Infantry who played a major part in the Relief of Belsen; the 113 LAA regiment RA (DLI) TA It was on the 18th April that the DLI regiment arrived; they had managed to get 238 miles in 22 hours, including getting behind German lines and on 19 April they relieved a 63rd 3/6 is battery. The regiment included Wilfred Lavin, took over the arsenal, the female reception camp and the hospital area. Before they had arrived three commandos had been shot.
The regiment established an HQ and REME, as there were engineers and electricians attached. The regiment found a carpet of bodies with German guards running around, while other Germans just walked among the rotting flesh.
There were appalling living conditions with people sleeping three in a bed add huts for 60 actually containing 600. There were no sanitary arrangements and both inside and outside the huts was an almost continuous carpet of dead bodies, human excrement, and filth. in all there were about 50,000 people to supply and feed with totally inadequate cooking facilities.
This is what this regiment from the DLI had to deal with 80 years ago. Many of those who were involved in the Relief of Belsen were traumatised by what they saw; the pain, the death and the needless suffering of innocent people, and they found it very hard to talk about it once they got back to County Durham. However, it is important that we talk about it now so that we can remember exactly where the dark road paved with hatred, intolerance and bigotry can lead us to.
Wilf Lavin
200 of the soldiers from the DLI who were at Belsen were from Hartlepool and one of those was Wilf Lavin. His son Frank, now 91, still lives in Hartlepool and I caught up with him this week, the week of the anniversary, to ask him what his thoughts were about what his father and the others from the DLI and the other man from the DLI had seen and done and why it’s important that we remember this anniversary this week and at other times as well.
“Every anniversary I think not only of father, but all that generation. I was watching about the D-Day landings and my dad was not in the first wave but was involved in the Battle for Falaise soon after …Quite a few were killed at Falaise.
Speaking of the day his father entered Belsen, as part of the DLI regiment he remembered his dad telling him about how he had been warned about Belsen: “My father was told for God’s sake don’t go in there”
I told Frank of a programme about Belsen currently in the history section of BBC i-player called ‘What they Found’, which contained footage, much of it distressing, of what soldiers like his father had found. The piles of bodies, the soldiers with handkerchiefs over their mouths to try and avoid catching the typhus plague that was running riot at the camp and the pathetic looking guards, male and female, who had the power and life and death over the inmates.
Frank immediately found the programme on his television and after watching it phoned me back to thank me for alerting him to it. He also commented on how terrible the scenes at Belsen had been and poignantly added that while he had been to Auschwitz three times, he had never been to Belsen, despite his father having been there. It was simply too close to his family experience for him to do so.
Indeed, Frank also commented that: “My father used to have nightmares about it after he came back from the war”.
Considering the anniversary on Friday, Frank said: “I will be thinking of my dad on Friday. Where did the time go? Why do we have Putin now?”
The final word
I will leave the final word to a survivor of the Bergen-Belsen camp. It was reported on 15 April, the 80th anniversary of the first British troops arriving at Belsen, three days before the DLI reached the camp that the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British forces was as much a cause for joy as for the horror to come flooding back, for Lola Hassid Angel, a survivor of Belsen, who it was noted “can vividly recall the hunger, disease and death at Nazi camp liberated exactly 80 years ago”.
Angel is now 88 and a great-great-grandmother, living in an apartment in Athens, who was said to be able to vividly recall the arrival in October 1944 of thousands of what were described as “exhausted and skeletal” female inmates, including Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot.
Angel said: “But it’s also different. Now I want to tell the whole world what happened. And that’s because I want all these men who lead us to know what war really looks like. The Germans had a zeal for death; they had turned it into a science.”
“What happened there was an abomination,” Angel said. “An abomination that historians will one day refer to as a dark page but which we, as the last survivors, are duty-bound to describe.”
“In Auschwitz it was the gas chambers, in Bergen-Belsen it was death through hunger and disease. The Germans were losing the war. They felt they were running out of time and they knew that in Bergen-Belsen, where typhus was so rife, they’d die very soon.”
CLICK HERE TO DONATE TO OUR CROWDFUNDER
HELP US BECOME STRONGER SO THAT WE CAN CONTINUE TO DELIVER POWERFUL CITIZEN JOURNALISM!
