Category Archives: World War Two

Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp – a summary

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Whilst in the Bergen-Hohne area of Germany, writes Stella Milner, a friend took me to a village called Belsen.  I knew nothing of the lovely rustic area other than how beautiful is was. The long wooden hut on the roadside seemed unaccountably odd in the tranquil suburb; and the inside was equally intriguing but very disturbing.  Indeed, the photographs were so grisly and distressing it was a relief to get outside, but the morbid atmosphere was worse.  The bright sunshine had disappeared, leaving an ominous grey sky, with not a single cloud, nor the smallest breeze; no wildlife, not even a blade of grass between the huge concrete blocks; and there was not a sound, until the repetitive firing in the distance echoed amongst the hushed graveyard.  Looking at the massive concrete block to my left, I remembered one of the photographs; on the edge of what seemed a gigantic hole was an enormous heap of human bones; bones that were all that was left of many human beings.  In the background of the picture there was an army dump-truck waiting to shove them into the dark soil.  Even in death they were without respect. It was the place where, sometime in early March 1945, Anne Frank died.

That brief subjoin into the past moved me far more than anything I had seen or heard before.  I felt sad and yet angry as I left, but wanted to know more.

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp1933-1939

1933 – GERMAN CAMPS AND SUB CAMPS

The first German camp was Dachau which became their prototype and the model for all that followed during the Second World War.  The Dachau camp was built on the sight of an abandoned munitions factory about 16 kilometres north-west of Munich and in the southern state of Bavaria.  It was opened on 22 March 1933 and was a concentration camp for Germany’s own nationals; mainly political and those who opposed the Nazi regime.

Ironically, between 1945 and 1948 the Dachau camp contained SS officers; later, German people who had been expelled from Czechoslovakia and had nowhere to go; and lastly, it became a base for the Americans. It closed in 1960.  During its first twelve years, Dachau’s intake was around 206,200 and of those people about 31,950 prisoners died.

SUB-CAMPS

It is thought that the Germans established about 15,000 camps and sub-camps, which were split into three uses; concentration, death and labour camps; of which, at least 600 camps were in Germany.  But that is just an estimate and it is doubtful that an exact number will ever be reached.  It is also thought that there were at least two sub-camps in the area of Belsen, but they were probably destroyed in 1945 along with the complete base camp.

BELSEN and BERGEN

Between 1935 and 1937 the Wehrmacht built an expansive military training complex between Bergen and Belsen.  It was the largest exercise complex in Germany and was built as part of the Reich’s grand re-armament plans. They obviously chose the area because of its sparse population and varying landscapes, which were ideal for battle-size exercises with their armoured vehicles.  It not only meant the relocation of around 3,635 residents but also the destruction of most of their twenty-five villages.

BELSEN SECTOR

The Belsen sector consisted of over a hundred barrack blocks, fifty stables, forty massive garage blocks, a hospital, storage depots and a factory for making targets for the firing ranges, and, in the southern area, an ammunition dump.  The construction workers were housed in huts in Fallingbostel- Oerbka.  The two villages were neighbours that made up the West camp. By 4 May 1936 some units were in residence and in 1938 the entire complex was in use.  However, when the training complex was finished the huts were redundant until just after Germans entered Poland in September 1939.

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The Spy Who Loved by Clare Mulley: review

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One can’t help but gasp with admiration at the life and exploits of Christine Granville, one of Britain’s bravest wartime heroines. On reading Clare Mulley’s entertaining biography, The Spy Who Loved, we are introduced to a woman who lived life on the edge and who found ordinary, routine existence a bore. Mulley writes with almost a venerable regard for her subject and rightly so, for one would expect the life of Christine Granville to exist only within the pages of fiction. Indeed, she may well have been the inspiration for Ian Fleming’s character, Vesper Lynd, from his first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

The Spy Who LovedBorn Krystyna Skarbek in Poland, 1908, to a rakish father, a count who taught her how to ride a horse like a man, and a wealthy, Jewish mother, Christine Granville, the name she later adopted, enjoyed an aristocratic, carefree childhood, whose tomboy antics earned the respect of her loving father. Granville disdained authority and convention from an early age, pushing boundaries wherever she went. As a convent schoolgirl, she was expelled for setting fire to the priest’s cassock. (He was wearing it at the time).

Absolutely fearless

With the outbreak of war in September 1939, Granville and her second husband travelled to London where she offered her services to British intelligence. She was sent to Hungary and from there, skied into German-occupied Poland. And from here, Granville’s life of adventure, incredible courage and resilience begins. ‘She is,’ wrote one secret service report, ‘absolutely fearless’ and, from another report, ‘ready to risk her life at any moment for what she believed in’. What Granville believed in, was to play an active role in undermining Nazi control of her beloved homeland.

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The Tizard Mission and the Development of Radar

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Although aircraft were used to good effect in the First World War, their function was largely limited to roles of reconnaissance and dog-fighting.  The use of aerial bombing was extremely limited.  But after the war, Britain saw the potential of the bomber, and recognized itself to be an unfortunately ideal target; an aerial attack seemed tailor-made to an island nation with densely packed population and industry.

The devastating potential of aerial bombing became all the more clear in 1937, during the Spanish Civil War.  German forces, in support of Franco’s attempt to overthrow Spain’s new Republican government, staged a large-scale air attack on the town of Guernica.  Hundreds were killed, and the town nearly leveled, by waves of German bomber aircraft.  The era of air warfare had begun.  Long before the Guernica devastation, and convinced that “the bomber will always get through,” Britain had realized by the early 1930s that its existing aerial defenses, consisting of air patrols and ground-based visual observers, would provide little if any warning of an attack from Germany.  A change was needed.

Radar Development Programs, and Chain Home

Throughout the 1930s, there were numerous national research programs concentrating on the development of systems employing the reflection of radio waves to detect distant objects, such as ships and aircraft.  Such systems are what we now know as radar (the term itself was first coined around 1940), but was initially termed RDF, for Radio Direction Finding.  In addition to Britain, other nations, including the United States, Germany, France, The Netherlands, Italy, Russia, and Japan, were active in this field of research, with varying levels of success. Continue reading →

Nancy Wake – Hero of World War Two

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In her book Women Heroes of World War II, author Kathryn Atwood looks at the lives and courageous feats of twenty-six women during the Second World War. Here, Kathryn pays special tribute to Nancy Wake, a leading figure in the French Resistance.

Women Heroes of WWIIAll of the women in my book had impressive reserves of moral courage and most had specific epiphanies in which they decided to fight the Germans. So what differentiates Nancy Wake from the others? I believe it was Nancy’s dramatic and fascinating masculine/feminine duality, something that made this highly decorated Second World War hero perfect for the one job in which she would ultimately come to feel the most pride: her incredible 500 km, 72-hour bike ride that kept her enormous band of French fighters connected with London at a crucial moment in their battle against the Germans

Moment of epiphany

Many of the women featured in my book, Women Heroes of World War II, had epiphanies during which they decided to take their stand against the Nazis. For one, it was when she saw her father weeping at the onset of Belgium’s second German occupation. For another, it was the sight of women and children being chased down and shot in a Jewish ghetto.

Nancy Wake’s moment came in 1934 during a trip to Vienna where she and her fellow journalists were seeking the truth behind the Nazi-induced horror stories pouring out of Austria and Germany. There in Vienna’s very public main square, she saw a gang of Hitler’s Brown Shirts whipping Jewish men who were chained to enormous moving wheels. She documented her reaction to this scene in her memoir: “I resolved there and then that if I ever had the chance I would do anything, however big or small, stupid or dangerous, to try and make things more difficult for their rotten party. When war came to France, followed by the occupation, I found it quite natural to take the stand I did.”

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The Bombing of Dresden

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From about 10 pm on the night of 13 February 1945 until noon the following day, the East German city of Dresden was the subject of one the most intense bombing raids of the Second World War. Several German cities were targeted but it is the bombing of Dresden, and its utter destruction, that came to symbolise the work of the RAF’s Bomber Command and its commander, Sir Arthur Harris.

Florence of the Elbe

DresdenGermany’s seventh largest city, 100 miles southeast of Berlin, Dresden was known as the ‘Florence of the Elbe’, such was its architectural splendour, its large collections of art and quaint timbered buildings. In February 1945, the city’s population had temporarily been inflated by a huge influx of German refugees, perhaps up to 350,000, fleeing the Soviet advance sixty miles away to the east.

With only minimal anti-aircraft guns, few German troops, and limited war-related industry, Dresden was still deemed a legitimate target – for Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s intention was not so much military but ‘moral bombing’, to demoralise the civilian population and thereby shorten the war (despite evidence during the Blitz that instead of demoralising civilians, bombing only hardened resolve). The strategic objective of bombing Dresden and other cities in eastern Germany was, as agreed at the Anglo-American Yalta Conference, to help alleviate the pressures on Soviet forces advancing into Germany on the Eastern Front.

The Allied commanders studied aerial photographs of German cities and specifically targeted areas of heavy residential populations. His aim, said Harris, was to make the ‘rubble bounce’ not just in Dresden but in every German city.

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Anne Frank’s Diary Released As An App

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The Diary of a Young Girl ranks amongst the most widely-read books in the world. Written by the teenage Anne Frank between 1942 and 1944 and published posthumously, it is regarded as one of the most compelling and remarkable documents to emerge from the Holocaust era. 2012 marked the 65th anniversary of the diary’s publication and this weekend the first digital app of Anne’s work has been released, coinciding with Holocaust Memorial Day on 27 January.

Anne FrankAnne was born into a liberal German-Jewish family in 1929. The Franks emigrated to Amsterdam following Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, to escape the intolerance directed at Jews under the new Nazi regime. When the Netherlands was occupied during World War Two, anti-Semitic persecution intensified and in 1942 the Frank family went into hiding. Along with four other German Jews, the Franks remained hidden in an annexe above Otto Frank’s business premises for twenty-five months, until on 4 August 1944 they were betrayed and arrested by the Gestapo.

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900 Days: the Myth and Reality of the Leningrad Blockade

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Four years in the making, Jessica Gorter’s film, 900 Days: the Myth and Reality of the Leningrad Blockade, considers how the Siege of Leningrad was acknowledged in the Soviet Union during the post-war years and how, seventy years on, it’s remembered by those who lived through it.

Over twenty-nine months, between 1941 and 1944, German forces encircled the city of Leningrad (now St Petersburg) and subjected it to a devastating siege. The number of deaths in Leningrad during the war exceeds those who died from the atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined, and constitutes the largest death toll ever recorded in a single city.

Hero City

For almost nine hundred days, the city resisted the Germans pounding at its gates. Its survival contributed to the defeat of Nazism. But the price was heavy – over one million died in Leningrad from German bombs and artillery, or from disease, the cold or starvation.

In its suffering Leningrad became a source of symbolic national pride, of good conquering evil. The story of the siege is one of heroic resistance and stoical survival but it also one of unimaginable suffering and extreme deprivation.

In the immediate aftermath of the siege, Leningrad, awarded the Order of Lenin, was held up as the pinnacle of Soviet endurance, spirit and heroic suffering. It was given the accolade, ‘Hero City’, which not even Moscow had achieved. The one million that died, did so nobly – ‘on the altar of the Motherland’. Those who had survived were awarded the Defence of Leningrad Medal.

Yes, the city had suffered but that it survived was a testament to the political strength of its people and their belief in Communism which had triumphed over Hitler’s fascist hoards. At least that’s the version perpetuated by Joseph Stalin. Leningrad’s torment became a banner for propaganda.

But there is nothing noble about death in such circumstances, nothing ideological about the city’s survival. The real stories that emerged from the siege had to be repressed. No one dared write or mention aloud the darkest aspects of the siege. Any mention of cannibalism was taboo. Diaries too explicit in the truth were confiscated, their authors labelled enemies of the people. A museum dedicated to the siege, opened in 1946, was deemed too bleak in its honest portrayal of what happened and was closed within three years, its director arrested. Stalin required suffering on a heroic scale, not the sordid, pitying suffering endured by so many for so long.

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The Entertainers of World War Two

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Very little, writes Hilary Green, has been written about the people who helped to raise morale, both among the troops and the civilians, by providing entertainment during the war. A few names come immediately to mind – Vera Lynn singing ‘We’ll Meet Again’, Ann Shelton, who was the ‘Forces Sweetheart’, and Gracie Fields – but few over the age of seventy remember what ENSA stood for. The Entertainment National Service Association was the brainchild of impresario Basil Dean and brought together both professional and amateur entertainers to perform in munitions factories, garrison theatres, village halls and, after D-Day, in tents and bomb damaged buildings across Europe, to bring a little relief from the ever-present danger and the gloom of rationing and the blackout. In spite of this it was still known, to some of those forced to attend its less successful performances, as Every Night Something Awful.

I have a personal reason for my interest in the subject. Both my parents were in the entertainment industry before the outbreak of war, my father as a singer and my mother as a dancer. Neither of them served with ENSA because my father joined the RAF as soon as war was declared and my mother had by then a family to care for. I grew up, however, listening to their reminiscences of life ‘on the stage’ and from time to time we would hear a singer or a comedian on the ‘wireless’ and one of them would say ‘Oh, I remember him/her. I worked with him/her in such and such a show before the war.’ When I questioned how these people had become household names the answer was simple. They went into ENSA. (Pictured: Gracie Fields, accompanied by an RAF orchestra, entertains airmen at their Christmas party, 1939. Taken from the collections of the Imperial War Museum. Click to enlarge). Continue reading →

Women of the SOE

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In my last piece for History In An Hour, writes Hilary Green, I wrote about the work of the First Aid Nursing Yeomanry during the First World War. When the conflict was over the FANY did not disband, although there was some difficulty in keeping membership buoyant in the inter-war years.

Nevertheless, a loyal core continued to train, although now the emphasis was not so much on nursing as on transport. It was clear that there was no longer any need for mounted nurses, the function for which they had been founded in 1907, but their ability to drive and maintain motor vehicles had been crucial during the 1914-18 period. So now they concentrated on this aspect of the training and shortly before the outbreak of the Second World War it was suggested that they should come under the aegis of the Auxiliary Territorial Service (the ATS) as the Women’s Motor Transport Company. And it was in this capacity that many of them did sterling work driving ambulances and chauffeuring high-ranking officers during the war. (It was into this corps that Princess Elizabeth, now our Queen, was recruited in order to ‘do her bit’.)

Some long-standing FANYs, however, refused to be subsumed into the ATS. Their independence from other authority had always been a matter of pride and they insisted on maintaining it, becoming known as the ‘Free FANY.’ It was this independence that made them ideally suited to working with the SOE.

Special Operations Executive

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Harbour of Hope

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Harbour of Hope is a heartbreaking, but life-affirming documentary about the life stories of Irene Krausz-Fainman, Ewa Kabacinska Jansson and Joe Rozenberg. In 1945, they were among the 30,000 survivors that were rescued from German concentration camps and brought to the peaceful harbour town of Malmö in Sweden. There, their lives began again.

Coming to Sweden in 1945 was a defining moment in the lives of Irene, Ewa and Joe. In Harbour of Hope they reveal their stories – from the complicated moments of freedom to the mysteries and questions that still haunt them today.

The film is based on a wealth of unique archive footage. In Swedish news reels from April 1945, we see the 10 year-old Jewish girl, Irene, taking her first shaky steps of freedom and new-born Ewa being carried onto the harbour by her Polish mother (pictured).

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