Amid the evil of Belsen, Queen lays past to rest
IT was her personal wish to visit the site marking one of the darkest episodes of 20th century history. While, as head of the Armed Forces and the Commonwealth, she has paid her respects at battlefields and war memorials on every continent, until yesterday afternoon the Queen had never seen a Nazi concentration camp.
Alone with their thoughts amid chilling reminders of the evils of the Holocaust, the 89-year- old monarch and Prince Philip, 94, walked for a quarter of a mile through Belsen, now a memorial site.
They paused at the headstone of Anne Frank and her sister Margot, inspecting the many tributes there. The Queen and Philip also laid a wreath at the Inscription Wall, which commemorates the 70,000 – nearly half of them Jewish – who died here.
Dressed in dark grey, the Queen, had come to hear first-hand from a small group of those who had somehow endured the hell of the camp and from some of British servicemen who had liberated it in April 1945. The survivors and their families present were moved. ‘It was very touching and truly historic,’ said Rudy Oppenheimer, 83, a Belsen survivor who now gives talks to schools for the Holocaust Education Trust.
After the noisy success of this week’s state visit, the Queen’s fifth to Germany, this moment was utterly, compellingly different. The public, officialdom and the media had all been kept well back at the Palace’s request.
As the Queen herself remarked in her speech at a state banquet, her Belsen visit would be a signal of the ‘complete reconciliation’ between Britain and Germany.
‘You cannot imagine the horror of this place, the pall of death – and not a single bird singing,’ said Captain Eric ‘Winkle’ Brown, one of the original liberators, who met the Queen yesterday. ‘But her visit sends out a very important message of reconciliation. She is saying to the young people of Germany that they should not feel guilt. Because that guilt can sit very heavily on their shoulders.’
Even after five years’ war, British troops who liberated Belsen could barely comprehend the depravity they stumbled upon here 70 years ago. Combat was one sort of horror. To find 50,000 abandoned souls, half-dead or dying, amid thousands of unburied corpses was quite another.
Captain Brown, of the Fleet Air Arm, one of the most distinguished test pilots of the war (he has flown more types of aircraft than anyone in history), came to Belsen quite by chance. He was nearby inspecting captured Luftwaffe jets in 1945 when his excellent German was overheard by a British brigadier en route to liberate Belsen. Brown was asked to come along to interrogate the SS guards. He was utterly appalled by what he found. On this, his first return for many years, the 96-year-old’s first thought yesterday was to listen out for the birds. One or two could be heard in the distance. ‘But by God they’re still sparse in a place like this.’ Like anyone who sets foot inside what is now called the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, the Queen will have been struck by the veneer of natural beauty – trees and verdant heathland – interspersed with so many haunting reminders of barbarism. In all directions, you spot grassy mounds. Each one is a mass grave with a stone base recording the number of dead. ‘Here lie 800... Here lie 1,000...’
Unlike the notorious extermination camp at Auschwitz in Poland – still preserved as a warning to the world – Belsen, near Hanover, had not been designed for mass murder. Built as a transit camp for prisoners of war, it had become a full-scale concentration camp for Jews and political prisoners. As more and more people were crammed in with no food or basic sanitation, let alone medicine, it seized up. In the first four months of 1945, SS guards stood by and watched as 35,000 died of starvation or lice-born typhus.
More than 50,000 people were still breathing when men like Eric Brown arrived on April 15, 1945. But liberation was a hollow term for many – 15,000 would die in the care of British medical staff.
Within months, British troops turned flame-throwers on its fetid, disease-ridden huts and pulled down the watch towers. Today, an excellent new museum attracts 250,000 visitors a year.
Some of the most touching exhibits are the thank you letters from former prisoners to their liberators.
The headstone to Anne Frank and her sister is never short of visitors. Many place a stone on it, in keeping with Jewish tradition. One was from a Catholic college in Widnes.
THE Frank sisters are among those beneath the unnamed burial mounds. After two years hiding in the secret recess of an Amsterdam apartment, where Anne wrote her extraordinary diary, the Frank family were betrayed.
Deported to a series of camps, the sisters ended up in Belsen. Anne, then 15, is thought to have died of typhus in March 1945, within days of Margot, 19.
The Queen’s visit to Belsen, her final engagement before returning to the UK, was in sombre contrast to joyful scenes earlier in the day.
On a walkabout as she left the Adlon Hotel in Berlin, where she had been staying, she met German children including five-year- old Konrad Thelen, dressed splendidly as a king.
At Belsen, the Queen asked Captain Brown the question everyone asks and which no one can ever really answer: ‘What was it like?’
‘Just a field of corpses. A horrible sight...’ he replied, his words tailing off. The Queen did not need to hear any more. In this place, you don’t.