- Headline
-
SS Guards Forced to Bury Victims of Their Bestiality
- Sub-Headline
- No Coffins, Flowers, Tears or Music Mark Funeral at Belsen; Only Litany Hoarse Orders of Troops Sick With Fury
- Publication Date
- Saturday, April 21, 1945
- Historical Event
-
Other Noteworthy Findings
This database includes 1,580 articles about this event - Article Type
- Newspaper
- Location
- Page Section and Number
- 1
- Author/Byline
- William Frye (AP Correspondent)
- Article Text
- BELSEN, Germany, April 20—The dead were getting a burial today at this fearsome concentration camp—each nameless dead getting a ghastly burial.
No coffins or flowers at this funeral. No tears or well-bred sympathy. No music.
These naked corpses were hauled in trucks and dumped into a pit. Thier pall bearers were SS (elite guard) men and women, now Allied prisoners.
Thier litany was the hoarse shouts of British soldiers, sick with disgust and fury, ordering these marked members of Hitler's chosen legions about their horrible task.
Lifeless Dead, Living Dead
I saw Belsen—its piles of lifeless dead and its aimless swarms of living dead. Their great eyes were just animal lights in skin-covered skulls of famine.
Some were dying of typhus, some of typhoid, some of tuberculosis, but most were just dying of starvation. Starvation—the flesh on their bodies had fed on itself until there was no flesh left, just skin covering bones and the end of all hope, and nothing left to feed on.
Tragically, there is still hop inside these still-breathing cadavers. As long as eyes can stare from the bodies scattered everywhere on the floors and on the ground there is hope. Hope in these for whom there is no hope. They are living but they cannot live. No food, no care can save them. Ahead of them is nothing—nothing but that pit with the bulldozer waiting to cover them with earth.
Nothing—well, there is one thing, the knowledge that after months of bestiality there is suddenly, unbelievably, friendliness and goodwill among men. At least they will die aware of that.
30,000 Died
Countless thousands — some say 30,000, some say more—died without even that comfort, died horrible deaths before the British Second Army reached this camp on the Aller River southeast of Bremen Sunday.
I saw these dead—hundreds and thousands—lying in ditches and against walls of drab huts and piled in heaps, each one in a grotesque attitude in a grotesque mound. Some were clothed, but most were naked. Their nakedness was of no account because there had long ceased to be anything recognizably human about them, even before the last flicker of life disappeared.
I saw the living beside these dead. Living—they still walked and talked and stared curiously, unemotionally at visitors and sniped cigarette butts
—
See BURIAL—Page 4 - History Unfolded Contributor
- Patricia P.
- Location of Research
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