This is a report about SS Guards shooting prisoners after the liberation of the camp. Give your own account of what had happened at the cookhouse. How did the incident end? What does it tell you about the attitude of the British towards Kramer and the SS? What does the writer say which tells you this? Read Source 3. This section of the document describes how the problems of feeding the prisoners at Belsen was handled initially.
How did the British army set about meeting the basic needs of the prisoners? What effect did this have? Why do you think he used this word? Read Source 4. This is a witness statement from one of the prisoners at Belsen. What had Hilde Lisiewitz done? What had Karl Egersdorf done? Look at the photographs in Source 5.
Do the people you are looking at seem capable of the actions you have read about? Kramer and some of the SS Guards were put on trial for war crimes by the British. Some guards said the same. Do you think this is an acceptable defence? Kramer and several guards were executed.
Do you agree with these punishments? Many guards escaped and lived quietly for many years. Do you think it is right to arrest and try former concentration camp guards 40 or 50 years after the events described here?
Look at Sources 5 a and b. These are photographs of some of the SS guards who worked at Belsen. Those who are mentioned in the reports in Source 4 are shown here. What can we learn from these photographs? This lesson has a History Hook starter video to hook students into this topic. However, this lesson based on documents concerning Bergen-Belsen, offers two further themes to discuss with students: Firstly, it shows that British soldiers were aghast at what they found when they liberated the camp.
Why did the Allies not bomb the camps? Bergen-Belsen was initially established in May as a prisoner of war camp, named Stalag It was situated in north Germany. In spring , Himmler ordered the creation of a camp to hold Jewish prisoners who might be used in exchange schemes with the Allies.
These prisoners either had connections to places such as the United States of America or Palestine, or were viewed to be of particularly high value for other reasons. On 30 April , approximately people arrived at Bergen-Belsen on a transport from Buchenwald.
These prisoners were held in a section of Bergen-Belsen called the Prisoner Camp. Over the following two months, these prisoners were forced to convert the former prisoner of war camp into a concentration camp. The prisoners focused on constructing the Residence Camp, which became the main holding area for future prisoners. However, it was quickly reopened as a camp for the sick and prisoners in transit to other camps. Both the Prisoner Camp and the Residence Camp were split into several different sections, which segregated different groups of prisoners.
From July onwards, large amounts of prisoners arrived at the camp. These prisoners totalled approximately 15, people by the end of the year.
They were primarily housed in the Residence Camp. In , Bergen-Belsen started to receive inmates from various other camps across the eastern half of the Third Reich. By March , the prisoner population was approximately 45, prisoners, leading to severe overcrowding in all sections of the camp.
One of the few prisoners that managed to escape on a prisoner-exchange from Bergen-Belsen was Ruth Wiener. Whilst incarcerated in Westerbork and then Bergen-Belsen with her mother and two sisters, Ruth recorded her experiences in this diary.
Here, a page shows her address in Bergen-Belsen. This menu is from the boat which took Ruth Wiener and her family to their new lives in America. Ruth later expressed her elation and shock at the amount and quality of the food served on the ship in comparison to the food served in Bergen-Belsen. After the war, he was detained by the British and put on trial, where he was sentenced to death. Prior to his death, he gave this testimony on the conditions inside the camp.
Starting in early , transports arrived in great numbers to Bergen-Belsen from other concentration camps that had been evacuated near the front, e. A total of 85, additional prisoners arrived at Bergen-Belsen until April As a result, food was scarce and overcrowded conditions led to the outbreak of diseases such as typhus and dysentery.
Soon, apocalyptic conditions prevailed and the SS did nothing to contain the misery. In March alone, some 18, prisoners died. Towards the end of the war, there were more than 1, deaths per day. Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp, but due to the high death rate in the final months of the war, one could indeed call it a death camp in the end.
However, aside from the men who were poisoned with carbolic acid injections in the summer of , there was no active killing at Bergen-Belsen. Mass deaths were not planned as such; there were no gas chambers and no shootings.
These inmates were used for forced labor in the war economy, as was the case in other concentration camps, such as Buchenwald or Dachau during the second half of the war. The inmates held there were not supposed to die but were needed for a possible exchange ; they were allowed to wear civilian clothes instead of the striped prisoner uniform, and a small number of them were actually released around 2, Due to the popularity of her diary after the war, Anne Frank is probably the most well-known victim of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
In Bergen-Belsen, both sisters, who were already severely weakened by their time in Westerbork and Auschwitz, contracted typhus. He started working in the concentration camp system in and served as commandant of Wewelsburg concentration camp before his transfer to Bergen-Belsen in In December , he was sent into battle. Kramer had been working in the concentration camp system since , most recently as commandant of Natzweiler and Auschwitz-Birkenau. He stayed at Bergen-Belsen from December until the liberation of the camp on 15 April , when he was arrested by the British forces.
Of course, Haas and Kramer were not the only ones responsible for the catastrophic conditions in Bergen-Belsen.
0コメント