Bergen-Belsen was founded as an ‘exchange’ camp with the intention of isolating prominent or ‘foreign’ Jews – such as the 350 Sephardi Jews with Spanish, Turkish, Argentinian and Portuguese passports who were deported to Bergen-Belsen from Salonika in July 1943 – so that they could be ‘exchanged’ with Germany’s wartime enemies for German prisoners of war, war materials, and so on.
The fact of ‘exchange’ is paradoxical – that there should have been a camp designed to keep Jews alive so that they could be ‘exchanged’ to freedom runs counter to our narrative expectations about the Holocaust, which was, of course, an attempted genocide of all the Jews of Europe. Despite this, however, exchange confirms expectations about Nazi barbarism. What better illustration could there be of Nazi racism and dehumanization than their treatment of 2,500 Polish Jews deported to Bergen-Belsen in April 1943. Following a period in which the Nazis evaluated the ‘exchange’ potential of their papers, 1,800 of these inmates, deemed to have forged or low-value papers, were deported ‘East’ in early 1944. These Jews, who would have had knowledge of how the Nazis treated Jews in the East, lived for three quarters of a year with the false hope of ‘exchange’ before the Nazis transported them to their deaths. ‘Exchange’ also gives a window into the delusional ideology of Nazism that underlay all aspects of the Holocaust. The premise of ‘exchange’ was the assumed existence of ‘World Jewry’, pulling the puppet strings of governments in the United States, the Soviet Union and elsewhere. The fact that so few Jews were in fact ‘exchanged’ underlines the fantastical nature of that ideology.
As well as giving us insights into the Holocaust and its perpetration, the stories of the site at Bergen-Belsen can give us insights into the wider history of German brutality during World War II, challenging widely held doxa and common beliefs. For years – and particularly once the development of the Cold War made West Germany a valuable ally – the brutalities that were perpetrated against Germany’s enemies during World War II were attributed exclusively to the SS in an intellectual operation that allowed the ‘contagion’ of Nazism to be sequestered and kept at a distance from the German state more generally. What happened at Stalag XIC – and the wider complex of prisoner of war camps around it – points to the falsity of that narrative. Before it became Bergen-Belsen Detention Camp, the site had been a prisoner of war camp where Soviet prisoners were systematically mistreated, neglected and starved to death by the German Army. It is estimated that more than 30,000 Soviet POWs were starved and worked to death in the camps on Lüneburg Heath in 1941 and 1942. At least 14,000 of the 21,000 Soviet POWs who were sent to Stalag XIC were done to death by the German Army and buried there before any thought had been given to the idea of developing an ‘exchange’ camp on the site.
The history of the site at Bergen-Belsen also reveals a great deal that is often forgotten about the aftermath of the Second World War and the end of the Holocaust. It is often assumed that 1945 brought ‘liberation’ for the victims of Nazism. This is, of course, naïve: you cannot easily be liberated from life-changing experiences of torture, slave labour and genocide, whose consequences lived-on for victims and, often, affected the experiences of their families and the next generation.
There is another sense in which the history of Bergen-Belsen can have a somewhat destabilizing effect on the doxa or common beliefs about liberation. There can be no doubting the heroic nature and scale of the rescue operation that the British Army and numerous voluntary organizations completed in the former concentration camp and adjacent army barracks between April and June 1945. There can be no avoiding the fact, however, that there were still 12 thousand Jews in Bergen-Höhne Displaced Persons camp after liberation and that many remained there until 1950 when the DP camp was finally wound-up.
A paradox relating to the experience of many Jewish victims of the Holocaust in Bergen-Belsen and elsewhere is captured in the words of Josef Podemski, an inmate of the DP camp who emigrated to Israel in 1949 and then to Canada. He was interviewed by researchers at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial in 2000 and said: ‘‘We’re not Hungarian, we’re not Czech, we’re not Austrian. We are Jews! This is what Hitler made of us!’ (Buchholz, p.362). Many Jewish former citizens of Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia and other Eastern European countries who the British and their Allies categorized as ‘displaced’ persons refused to be ‘re-placed’ to their countries of pre-war residence and citizenship. For many, there was nothing to return to – as families and entire cultures had been wiped out in the Holocaust, and, in many cases, as there was a perception that they would not be welcomed back where the local population had collaborated in their persecution or profited from their absence. These ‘Displaced Persons’ often now understood their ‘place’ to be in Israel at a point at which it suited British political interests to prevent most of them from going there, a situation that only changed after the State of Israel was founded in 1948.
Note These reflections draw on the research contained in Bergen-Belsen: A Brief History for Teachers accessible on the Belsen 75 web page (https://www.belsen75.org.uk/school-resources/). References Buchholz, M. (Ed.). (2010). Bergen-Belsen—Wehrmacht POW Camp, 19401945, Concentration Camp, 1943-1945, Displaced Persons Camp, 1945-1950: Catalogue accompanying the permanent exhibition. Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation / Wallstein Verlag. Shephard, B. (2005). After Daybreak: The liberation of Belsen, 1945. Jonathan Cape. Wachsmann, N. (2016). KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Abacus.
