'V-food' food injections saving thousands of starving Nazi concentration camp victims
THOUSANDS of starving prisoners from Belsen, Buchenwald, Dachau and other Nazi concentration camps are being saved from death by special injections.
Since Belsen camp was taken over, deaths have been reduced from more than 200 a day to 20, thanks to protein hydrolysate, known as ‘V-food’, composed of pre-digested protein, glucose and vitamins.
It was first used during the Bengal famine of 1943, but this is the first time it has been mass produced to save life wholesale. It is thwarting the Nazis’ vile plans of slow death for their helpless victims.
Ample supplies are coming from Britain where, I am told, five specialised factories have been turned over to the manufacture of this potent fluid.
When injected into the veins of a starving person, it revives them to such an extent that in anything from six to 24 hours they are able to take food normally. From then the return to health is rapid.
In less extreme cases, the patient swallows a small quantity and in six hours swellings caused by starvation subside.
Brigadier Basil Wedd, deputy director of military government to the Canadian First Army, told me: ‘I don’t think it is going too far to say that protein hydrolysate is going to be Europe’s prime life-saver.’ The fluid is put in small bottles and flown in transport planes straight to camps and medical centres where the starving victims of Nazi brutality are being treated.
Four men — famous dietitian Sir Jack Drummond, Dr J. F. Lowitt, Professor John Beattie and Dr H. M. Sinclair — are superintending t he production of protein hydrolysate.
It should be stressed that the effectiveness of using this injection treatment to treat starvation has not yet been proved and feeding the Nazis’ victims with such nutritional mixtures is not the only way that the lives of these wretched people may be saved.
It is also vital that the former prisoners are able to hold down any nutrients and so conditions such as diarrhoea must be treated.
Once that is successfully tackled and a patient is able to hold down food, then their strength returns rapidly.
As well as starvation, the camps play host to many other deadly conditions, such as typhus and tuberculosis.
In Belsen alone, liberated last month by the British in scenes that shocked the civilised world, it has been estimated that 70 per cent of the survivors still require hospitalisation.
Medical teams f rom the British Army and the Red Cross have had to make the toughest of decisions by electing to treat those who have the greatest chance of survival.
Though this may prove to be controversial, there is simply no other option given the vast numbers in question. In just two weeks, 12,000 have already been nursed and treated in Belsen, and there are tens of thousands more in camps all over Germany who still require medical attention.
Despite the huge challenge, the British Army, augmented by 100 medical students flown out from Britain, is winning a medical campaign every bit as tough as a military battle.
The death rate in Belsen has been steadily falling, but, of course, even one death in a war that has killed millions is one death too many. That such deaths occur after the fighting has finished seems doubly tragic.
But hopefully, thanks to the inventive work of quiet and unassuming men in front of their test tubes, this vilest of legacies left by Hitler may soon be expunged.