Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney
BORN LONDON, APRIL 11, 1920. DIED ST VINCENT ISLAND, THE CARIBBEAN, MARCH 7, 2016, AGED 95
AS ONE of the first British officers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945, Lieutenant-Colonel Leonard Berney published his personal memoir, Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp, only last year, just in time for its 70th anniversary. The delay was perhaps not surprising given that nightmare experience, but Berney decided to write it especially for his grandchildren.
When on April 12, 1945, the 25-yearold Major Berney saw a German colonel approach their HQ waving a white flag, he and fellow officers had no idea what awaited them. The German officer simply told them that typhus had broken out in a nearby camp containing political prisoners and recommended that they should not fight over the camp lest the prisoners escape and spread the disease to both armies. So a truce was agreed. On April 15 Berney reached the truce line with the advance unit and took a jeep and a driver to meet the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, tasked with taking control of the camp.
When Berney reached the camp he encountered 30 armed SS guards headed by Captain Joseph Kramer, who told him that prisoners were rioting and trying to raid the food stores and the guards had to open fire on them.
What Berney saw next would haunt him for the rest of his life. “We saw dead bodies lying beside the road, and hun- dreds of emaciated men and women prisoners, still mostly behind barbed wire. Berney described the long wooden huts littered with corpses beside them. “At the end of the road we saw a large, open mass grave containing hudreds of corpses. The sight, the stench, the sheer horror of the place was indescribable.” Children were walking by, unfazed. The camp had contained 60,000 people of whom 10,000 had already died by this time, with 500 more dying each day.
After arresting the SS guards the British organised food stores, water and medical supplies. But some inmates could not digest the food, and up to 2,000 more died. A barracks was converted into a 15,000-bed hospital and doctors decided who could be saved and who could only be left to die.
Berney became commander of the transit camp where prisoners with a chance of life were transferred. The SS guards were then ordered to bury the bodies into 10 mass graves, which took two weeks. “The British then brought in prominent civilians to witness what their countrymen had perpetrated on innocent people — so the German civilians could not in the future say — it never happened.”
After Belsen was incinerated, the majority of prisoners from Russia and Russian-occupied countries were too afraid to return, and were refused permission to reach Palestine, their ultimate dream. “My orders were to stop people going to Palestine — but it was an order that could not be obeyed,” said Berney. He helped small groups Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney: liberator of Belsen and Holocaust educator of people who disappeared into the night by supplying them with food and water and the addresses of displacement camps where they could stop over en route.
After three months Berney handed over responsibility for Belsen’s liberation to the UN Relief and Rehabilitation Agency, and in September 1945 he gave evidence at the war crimes trial of Kramer and 43 other SS guards, nine of whom, apart from Kramer, received the death sentence. Berney was demobbed at the end of 1946 with the rank of Lieutenant-Colonel.
The son of Marie and Alexander Berney, Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who managed dress shops in the West End of London, Berney was educated at St Paul’s School, but the war dashed his hopes of entry to Cambridge. After the war, he went into the clothing industry. He married Patricia Purser in 1951, and they had three sons, but the marriage was later dissolved.
In the 1950s, he ran the Berketex clothing factory in Plymouth, where he built up a workforce of some 1,600. He returned to London as its managing director, and two years later ran the Rembrandt clothing company, before launching his own fashion firm, Leonard Berney Ltd. In the mid-1970s, he retired to southern Spain, and in 2009 took up residence on MS The World!
He loved travelling, flying to over 120 countries, many in his own Cessna plane. In his latter years, he became an active Holocaust educator. At the age of 93 he lectured on the liberation of Belsen for over three months on board ship and elsewhere. He also appeared in many TV news reports including Sky News’s Remembrance Sunday all-day report last year, and in such documentaries as Night Will Fall and No Asylum.
Last August he was interviewed by Natasha Kaplinsky for the UK Holocaust Memorial Foundation. Berney is survived by his sons Steve and John and three grandchildren. His middle son Nick predeceased him in 2014.