The Dry Salvages

demons:

As Winston Churchill addressed the British troops on the banks of the Rhine on March 26, I heard him say: “We are now entering the dire sink of iniquity.” These seemed strange words and I did not understand the full meaning of them until today, when at Belsen I witnessed the ultimate in human degradation. There the six-square-mile, barbed-wire enclosure in the heart of a rich agricultural center has been a hell on earth for 60,000 men, women & children of a dozen different nationalities who were being gradually starved to death by SS guards under a brutish, pigeyed leader, Captain Kramer. During the month of March, 17,000 people died of starvation, and they still die at the rate of 300 to 350 every 24 hours, far beyond the help of the British authorities, who are doing all possible to save as many as still have strength to react to treatment.

Children & Corpses. The magnitude of suffering and horror at Belsen cannot be expressed in words and even I, as an actual witness, found it impossible to comprehend fully—there was too much of it: it was too contrary to all principles of humanity—and I was coldly stunned. Under the pine trees the scattered dead were lying, not in twos or threes or dozens, but in thousands. The living tore ragged clothing from the corpses to build fires over which they boiled pine needles and roots for soup. Little children rested their heads against the stinking corpses of their mothers, too nearly dead themselves to cry. A man hobbled up to me and spoke to me in German. I couldn’t understand what he said and I shall never know, for he fell dead at my feet in the middle of his sentence.

The living lay side by side with the dead, their shriveled limbs and shrunken features making them almost indistinguishable. Women tore away their clothing and scratched the hordes of lice which fed on their emaciated bodies; rotten with dysentery, they relieved themselves where they lay and the stench was appalling. Naked bodies with gaping wounds in their backs and chests showed where those who still had the strength to use a knife had cut out the kidneys, livers and hearts of their fellow men and eaten them that they themselves might live.

Fat, Fleshy, Inhuman. Over all this the SS guards—both girls and men—had watched coldly and unmoved. I saw them too—fat, fleshy and inhuman. Now they have a different role in the camp. Under British guard they are made to collect the dead and drag them to a mass grave. From dawn to dusk the SS girls and men alike hold in their arms the bodies of the men, women & children whom they killed, and British Tommies, roused for once to a burning fury, allow them no respite. It is their just reward.

Perhaps it can all be summed up in the few croaking words that came from a pitiful pile of rags and bones that lay at my feet: “Look, Englishman, this is German culture.”

LIFE Correspondent George Rodger, April 30 1945 at Bergen-Belsen