Allied War Crimes in the concentration camps

[Charles Traynor]

The more I learn about Britain’s conduct in WWII the more I become ashamed to be British.



It is clear from this photograph that Dr. Klein has been physically abused by the British “liberators”.


The shackling of a commanding officer who has surrendered his command honourably and in good faith is reprehensible.

Thank goodness we amateur historians at RODOH are more widely read than the likes of NexGen, Statistical Mechanic and Bernard would wish us to be, and can play our small part in exposing their lies and the many war crimes committed by the Allies during WWII.

After the Anglo-Canadian landing at Dieppe, an armed reconnaissance for possible later invasion operations, it was reported that the enemy had shackled German prisoners of war and that regulations existed to kill the prisoners if they were found to be too much of a burden for the Allied troops to withdraw with them.

The Memoirs of Field-Marshal Wilhelm Keitel, p.257

It doesn’t get much worse than that.


The Führer:

One thing is quite certain—we should never have got anywhere with the British, if I had given way to them in one single instance. To-day, they regard me capable of anything; hence the satisfactory reply to our demand for the immediate cancellation of the order to manacle prisoners of war.

Hitler’s Table Talk 1941-1944, p.687

[Cerdic]

It was "reported"?

Shackling up prisoners is nothing new and barely a crime.

The top guy looks poorly kept, but let's see some evidence he actually was physically abused.

[theblackrabbitofinlé]

It was "reported"?

Shackling up prisoners is nothing new and barely a crime.

The top guy looks poorly kept, but let's see some evidence he actually was physically abused.

What kind of evidence will you accept Cedric?

Presumably not a link to a homework-help page.

[theblackrabbitofinlé]

British journalist Alan Moorehead describes visiting the German prisoners soon after Belsen's liberation.

I believe Klein was the only doctor on the stand at the 1st Belsen trial, so he was very likely the gentlemen who Moorehead saw begging to be killed as he couldn't stand the interrogations any longer.

Just before you get to the main entrance of Belsen concentration camp—or rather the place where the camp used to be before the British burned it down—you come on a farmhouse. I suggested to the others in my party that we should turn in there and eat lunch before, rather than after, we visited the camp. While the table was being set for us in the dining-room we were interested to know from the farmer what he thought of Belsen. "I don't know very much about it," he said. "Each morning I had to drive up there with a cart full of vegetables, swedes and turnips mostly, and one of the SS guards took the horse and cart from me at the gate. After a bit the cart and horse were returned and I drove away. I was never allowed inside and I didn't want to go in anyway. I knew something horrible was going on, but I didn't ask about it lest I should find myself inside."

We finished the meal and drove up to the gate with a special pass which General Dempsey had given the correspondents; from the first Dempsey was very keen that we should see Belsen and write about it. Although the British had only captured the place from the Germans a few days before they seemed to have things well organized. Hungarian guards were still spaced along the barbed-wire fence, good-looking men who jumped eagerly to attention when an army vehicle came by. At the gate British soldiers were on guard. There were notices in English: "Danger—Typhus." "Car Park." "Powder Room." "Inquiries," and so on. A young army doctor and a captain from the Pioneers were in charge. The captain's job was supervising the counting and burial of bodies. Possibly as a form of immunization from the grisly work he appeared to be in particularly jovial spirits.

"I love doing this," he said, picking up the metal syringe filled with anti-louse powder. "Come on."

A squirt up each sleeve. One down the trousers. Two more squirts down the back and front of the shirt and a final shot on the hair. It was rather pleasant.

"We collected the local burgomasters from the surrounding villages this morning and took them round the camp," the doctor said.

"How did they take it?"

"One of them was sick and another one wouldn't look. They all said they had never dreamed that this was going on."

We were now walking down the main driveway towards the first of the huts and administrative buildings. There were large crowds of civilian prisoners about, both those who strolled about in groups talking many different languages and those who sat silently on the ground. In addition there were many forms lying on the earth partly covered in rags, but it was not possible to say whether they were alive or dead or simply in the process of dying. It would be a day or two before the doctors got round to them for a diagnosis.

"There's quite a different air about the place in the last two days," the doctor said. "They seem much more cheerful now."

"And the burial rate has gone down considerably," the captain added. "I'm handling just under three hundred a day now. It was five hundred to start with. And we are evacuating five hundred every day to the panzer training-school. It has been made into a hospital. Would you like to see the SS boys?"

We saw the women guards first. A British sergeant threw open the cell door and some twenty women wearing dirty gray skirts and tunics were sitting and lying on the floor. "Get up," the sergeant roared in English.

They got up and stood to attention in a semi-circle round the room and we looked at them. Thin ones, fat ones, scraggy ones and muscular ones; all of them ugly and one or two of them distinctly cretinous. I pointed out one, a big woman with bright golden hair and a bright pink complexion.

"She was Kramer's girl friend," the sergeant growled. "Nice lot, aren't they?"

There was another woman in a second room with almost delicate features, but she had the same set staring look in her eyes. The atmosphere of the reformatory school and the prison was inescapable.

Outside in the passageway there was a large blackboard ruled off in squares with white lines. Down the left-hand side of the board was a list of nationalities—"Poles, Dutch, Russians," and so on. Spaced along the top of the board was a list of religions and political faiths—"Communist, Jew, Atheist." From the board one might have seen at a glance just how many prisoners were in the camp from each nation and how they were subdivided politically and religiously. However, most of the numbers appeared to have been rubbed off, and it was difficult to make out the totals exactly. Germans seemed to make up the majority of the prisoners. After them Russians and Poles. A great many were Jews. As far as one could decipher there had been half a dozen British there, one or two Americans. There had been something like fifty thousand prisoners altogether.

As we approached the cells of the SS guards, the sergeant's language become ferocious.

"We had had an interrogation this morning," the captain said. "I'm afraid they are not a pretty sight."

"Who does the interrogation?"

"A Frenchman. I believe he was sent up here specially from the French underground to do the job."

The sergeant unbolted the first door and flung it back with a crack like thunder. He 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.

"Get up," the sergeant shouted. They were all on their feet now, but supporting themselves against the wall. "Get away from that wall."

They pushed themselves out into space and stood there swaying. Unlike the women they looked not at us but vacantly in front, staring at nothing.

Same thing in the next cell and the next, where the men were bleeding and very dirty, were moaning something in German.

"You had better see the doctor," the captain said. "He's a nice specimen. He invented some of the tortures here. He had one trick on injecting creosote and petrol into the prisoners' veins. He used to go round the huts and say: 'Too many people in here. far too many.' The used to loose off his revolver round the hut. The doctor has just finished his interrogation."

The doctor had a cell to himself.

"Come on. Get up," the sergeant shouted. The man was lying in his blood on the floor, a massive figure with a heavy head and bedraggled beard. He placed his two arms on to the seat of a wooden chair, gave himself a heave and got half-upright. One more heave and he was on his feet. He flung wide his arms towards us.

"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.

Alan Moorehead, Eclipse , NY: Harper & Row, 1968 (org. 1945), pp. 263-266.

[GreasyIrma]

I think it may not be Dr. Klein because the text describes the un-named doctor as being "a massive figure". In the pictures above Klein doesn't strike me as warranting that physical description.

[theblackrabbitofinlé]

I think it may not be Dr. Klein because the text describes the un-named doctor as being "a massive figure". In the pictures above Klein doesn't strike me as warranting that physical description.

Moorehead (on the left) was described as "short, neat, compact like a coil spring," by fellow Brit and journalist Doon Campbell.

His description of the doctor's size was likely in comparison to his own small stature. He wouldn't be the first, nor the last, short person to describe someone of average height as 'massive.'

Perhaps you can suggest who else it may have been, whilst bearing in mind Klein was repeatedly accused of injecting prisoners with petrol and other substances during the trial.

[been-there]

Fritz Klein was average size. Here he is relative to the size of other men, second from right.



Others were also accused of injecting petrol into inmates veins, such as male nurses Hein and Stibitz, but they had been at Auschwitz.
The only other main Doctor at Bergen-Belsen seems to be Dr. Horstmann. But he is reported to have left Bergen-Belsen on the 12th of April 1945 with the Wehrmacht troops and was killed on the 9th of May 1945, at Süderhastedt.

Testimony of DR. FRITZ LEO: "I am a German, a doctor of medicine, from Dresden, and was first arrested on 3rd May, 1935. Without interruption I have been continuously in confinement until Belsen Camp was liberated. I arrived at Belsen on 7th February, 1945, and worked as a doctor there, with the exception of three weeks when I had typhus, until the camp was liberated. Dr. Schnabel was the S.S. doctor there until he left at the end of February [after contracting typhus] when Dr. Horstmann and Dr. Klein arrived. I was a doctor in Men's Compound No. 2 and when I arrived the total number there, including my transport, amounted to about 6000."

Besides these three, other camp Doctors mentioned in the trial transcripts were Dr. Weber, Dr. Schumann (?Schulmann), S.S. Dr. Wirths (Wirtz), S.S. Doctor Prof. Globerg, S.S. Doctor Goebel, and Dr. Erman. Some of these may have been prisoners who worked as Doctors such as Dr. Leo.

So as Dr Klein was the chief doctor, and received the most notable attention in the burial 'atrocity' images and was a key accused at the trial, it would seem reasonable to assume, that BlackrabbitofInlé is correct and Dr. Klein was the one who is being referred to lying in a pool of his own blood after interrogations and begging to be killed.

So that description (from Alan Moorehead, Eclipse , NY: Harper & Row, 1968 (org. 1945), pp. 263-266.) seems like a quite reliable testimonial evidence of the kind of coercion and duress Dr. Klein was subjected to.

Will you accept it now, Cerdic!

[GreasyIrma]

Congratulations, Been there, I was just about to concede the point to Black Rabbit until you provided contrary points to his post. But thanks. And, no, I'm not Cerdic.

[Friedrich Paul Berg]

What a pity that Hitler did NOT have an atomic bomb to flatten London from end to end.

Friedrich Paul Berg

[been-there]

Congratulations, Been there, I was just about to concede the point to Black Rabbit until you provided contrary points to his post. But thanks. And, no, I'm not Cerdic.

Cerdic is the one who doubts Klein's testimony was given under duress. Do you also?
Which other "Doctor" of those I have mentioned do you think would have received such treatment and been deserving of being referred to as "THE Doctor" of Belsen?

"You had better see the doctor," the captain said. "He's a nice specimen. ...The doctor has just finished his interrogation."
The doctor had a cell to himself.