Talk:Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Untitled This article uses British english dialect and spelling. According to the relevant style guide, this should not be changed without broad consensus.

Please view another photo at de:KZ Bergen-Belsen

[Entrance] herewith licensed under GFDL

thx ;-)

The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposal. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the debate was move. —Nightstallion (?) 10:53, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

Needs To Be Placed On A Map

There should be a map of Germany showing where Bergen-Belsen was. I know some Germans don't like that, too bad, there should be a map posted anyway.

75.253.47.138 (talk) 04:43, 4 October 2009 (UTC)

Requested move

Bergen-Belsen → Bergen-Belsen concentration camp : To follow pattern of other concentration camp article titles.

Voting

Please add  * Support  or  * Oppose  followed by an optional one-sentence explanation, then sign your vote using "~~~~"

• Oppose - it was a POW, not a concentration camp until 1942. --_Lysy^talk 21:14, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Comment : It is foremostly as a concentration camp that Bergen-Belsen is remembered. This does not preclude its role as a POW camp being included in the article. David Kernow 23:34, 18 January 2006 (UTC)
• Support - for above reasons. LuiKhuntek 15:46, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Support : in case it is not assumed that I, as originator of the proposal, am in favor. (Direction to Wikipedia policy, please?)  David Kernow 20:49, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
• Support. And I would suggest the Bergen-Belsen to be a disamb article directing to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen DP camp and Bergen-Belsen POW camp. --_Lysy^talk 21:00, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
  • Seconded David Kernow 03:27, 20 January 2006 (UTC)
• Support. The name change is consistent with usage elsewhere ("Auschwitz concentration camp"). logologist|Talk 02:24, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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Thank you for making the move, Nightstallion. As per Lysy's suggestion above, I've now converted the Bergen-Belsen redirect page into a disambiguation page. David Kernow 14:11, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

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This camp was in Germany - I believe the latest historical consensus is that no gassings occurred in Germany proper in spite of what witnesses may claim. There were several other witnesses who contradict the historical consensus besides the gas immune boy and the soldier. The article should not try to imply a history that no reputable historian will support. The link mentioning the two eyewitnesses to gassing is scrapbooks - appears to be an unreliable source - no historian from either camp verifies much/most of their information. Very emotionally intense but light on facts and truth.

Search the web with "Kramer,belsen,etc" - you will find several articles of some scholarly merit, far removed from this propaganda piece.159.105.80.63 13:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Concernig negotiations over the camp - no mention that DDT was used after liberation, not released for use during the war. The Allies had DDT throughout the war, dropping DDT for camp use ( the Russians neede it too ) would have stopped most deaths - of course the Germans could have fought longer and harder.159.105.80.141 13:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

Was there a gas chamber at Belsen?

I've removed this section, as it seems to be giving undue weight to a minority view, based on sources which are objectively very poor. One comes from a who-he website, and quotes (without citation) a remembered converstion of thirty years earlier, the other is to a Canadian local paper reporting the comments of someone who claimed to have survived six attempts at gassing. Neither of these are particularly credible, to put it mildly. Extraordinary claims require an extraordinary level of proof. Since the bulk of sources say B-B had no gas chamber, adding this section based on these weak sources is unjustified. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 22:28, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

• I have restored the section, and then commented it out, pending discussion.

What is a "who-he website"?

This source seems to be as valid as many other reports of events that long ago. Among the very distressing job of clearing up after liberation, there were more things to do than making a detailed description of every installation and bit of equipment found. A smallish underground gas chamber may well have gone unnoticed, or thought in error at the time to be an ordinary cellar.

It seems possible to me that one among so many had a genetic mutation that made him immune to the gas used. Genetic oddities happen occasionally.

Anthony Appleyard 06:20, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

By a who-he website I mean one written by random persons, rather than one by a scholarly organisation such as USHMM or Yad Vashem.

The source is of very low reliability, because the claim of the soldier's son is reported from a book, but the book is not cited, so it is not verifiable by anyone. The excerpt also makes it clear that the son is remembering (after a gap of 20-30 years) what his father told him 30 years after the war. The likelyhood of misremembering on the part of the father or the son is reasonably high.

The attitude of the Allies during the invasion of Germany was that the perpetrators of crimes against peace and humanity were to be punished. It is unlikely that unknown facilities were destroyed immediately as they would constitute evidence.

The chance of a mutation which would allow respiration unaffected by carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide is negligible, and in any case, if someone wasn't gassed successfully they would almost certainly have been (a) shot or (b) sent for mediacl experimentation. Not gassed another *five* times and allowed to escape. Much more likely than this is that the victim's mental health had broken down and they believed that things had happened which had not.

To sum up, neither of these stories can be given much weight. The sources fail reliable sources and verifiability, and there is a prima facie implausibility about the gassing survivor account. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 09:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

In the 1945 trial for Belsen a doctor testified that thousands were gassed in one night. Why do the historians not believe the witnesses about German camps, but believe witnesses about Polish camps - no better testimony. All the German camps have progassing witnesses - who, what evidence moved the chambers out of Germany?159.105.80.141 17:25, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Cite your source - and there were no gas chambers at all in Belsen. We have the plans, we have the eye-witnesses and we have the film and photos and more eyewitnesses from its liberation. No gassings. That was done in the East. Darkmind1970 15:32, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

As for Germany, there were chambers of T-4 (operating also later) and possibly some "experimental" at the camps (also dissinfection chambers). --HanzoHattori 20:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Sources - this article - Simon Wisenthal - Martin Broszat - etc - other than the Nuremberg trials and a couple of eyewitnesses this story fell on its face years ago. Nizkor even lists it under " A tale of ..."159.105.80.141 19:25, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Precisely - its a case of a dubious source for Bergen-Belsen. There were no gas chambers in the place, and no historian has ever claimed that there were any. Just thousands of people being crammed into unsanitary huts in hideous conditions and being treated with total indifference and contempt by their guards as they died. You could smell the place a mile off. I shudder just thinking about it. Darkmind1970 08:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

The conditions were certainly hideous and insanitary, but do you have any source for your assertion that they were "treated with total indifference and contempt by their guards as they died"? It's perfectly possible of course, but isn't it equally possible that with 60,000 seriously ill and dying prisoners, and no sanitation, water, food or medicine (the civilian populations of Germany and Holland were starving too) the guards were simply overwhelmed and terrified of catching typhus themselves? There were many more prisoners than the site had been intended to house as a result of evacuation of Auschwitz and other eastern camps. These prisoners brought the typhus with them into Belsen. 78.147.100.109 05:50, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

There was a deliberate German policy of starvation in Holland, but while conditions were very hard in Germany there was no famine there - food was still coming down from places like Denmark. Belsen was far too smell for the numbers of people being jammed into it - but they were poured in anyway by the authorities. I would describe that as indifference and contempt. Darkmind1970 10:49, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll accept the point on famine in Germany. It was perhaps an overstatement. I don't have the knowledge. But the infrastructure was breaking down with the mass retreat from the east and Allied bombing of communications, and food was certainly scarce; I would think that feeding prisoners was low on the list of Nazi priorities at this point in the war (as feeding Indian civilians was for the British in the WW 2 Bengal famine). The massive overcrowding was not down to the guards, who cannot be blamed for mass of sick, starving and lice-infested prisoners pouring in from the eastern camps as they were evacuated. And what were the authorities supposed to do? Turn the prisoners loose in the countryside? The British didn't do this.

But this is getting OT as we are no longer discussing the article. 89.240.229.252 22:29, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, how´s this. My father was a member of the British 11th Armoured Division that liberated Belsen concentration camp. Once and for all, there were no gas chambers used for exterminating people at Belsen......and furthermore, many of the guards weren´t even German. They were Hungarian and other Eastern European nationalities. See the Trawniki concentration camp page. Now that´s interesting!! —Preceding unsigned comment added by 83.57.7.25 (talk) 18:45, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Channel 4 (UK commercial TV) program "The Relief Of Belsen", 9.00-11.05 pm Monday 15 October 2007

• This British TV program on Channel 4 [1] [2] was a filmed reconstruction of events there at liberation and after, using genuine old footage for scenes with prisoners in. It claimed that:
  • "Belsen had 2 camps: Camp 1 was the concentration camp, Camp 2 was used for other purposes. Camp 2 was adapted into a hospital, and that hospital is still open." The underlined text seems to contradict the article, which says that Bergen-Belsen DP camp was vacated in 1951. Did Channel 4 get it wrong? Or what? Was the hospital moved rather than closed down? Who is right? Anthony Appleyard 05:11, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the entire section about this. Do you know how many books over the last 60 years have been written about Belsen? Devoting so much detail to this programme trivialises Belsen. It was also in abysmal English. Jooler 20:12, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

How to pronounce "Belsen"?

• I am English. Every time I have heard the name Belsen, it was pronounced "Belssen". But this page's Russian equivalent transcribes it as Бельзен (= Bel'zen). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 06:56, 14 December 2007 (UTC)
  • Hi Anthony, I am English although speak and write in the Cyrillic alphabet also. The Russian translation you have as Бельзен is actually translated as (= Beleazen) ь sounds like ea in the word EArings. Hope this helps in some way. (talk) 16:31, 30 April 2008
• The Russian letter ь (soft sign) is silent: it merely softens the previous consonant. It is pronounced only in modern Mongolian, and in the reconstructed ancient pronunciation of Common Slavonic which St.Cyril invented his alphabet for. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 21:51, 20 August 2008 (UTC)

Hello, Anthony,

a) I share your experience, the word “Belsen” is usually pronounced /’belsən/ (“unvoiced s” [3]), as if it were an English word. But German-speaking natives utter it /’belzən/ (“voiced s”) as they naturally do with all syllables beginning with an “s” followed by a vocal, regardless the position of the syllable in the word (cf. “stimmhaftes deutsch s” [4]).

b) The Russian transcription, Бельзен, keeps the “voiced s” and palatalizes [5] the preceding “l”, so I would pronounce it /’bɛlʲzɪn/ (cf. Бельгия /’bɛlʲgijə/ “Belgium”). Nevertheless, I’m no expert in Slavistics.

Kind regards, --Zack Holly Venturi (talk) 20:19, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Semi-protect?

• semi-protect. High level of IP vandalism. Syrenab (talk) 16:40, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
• I semiprotected page Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 17:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

"A 'Jock' doctor"

Thank you, Anthony, for your speedy explanation. I had forgotten to do so on the spot, then I was on may way to fix it. In the quotation of Michael Bentine, there was a direct link from 'Jock' to Scotland. I've substituted «a ‘Jock’ (i.e. Scottish) doctor» for «a ‘Jock’ doctor». I'm afraid many people don't know this local term. I didn't.--Zack Holly Venturi (talk) 19:55, 5 September 2008 (UTC)

In the UK forces all Scotsmen are (or were) liable to be called 'Jock' by non-Scots. The equivalent for Welshmen is 'Taff' (or 'Taffy') and for Irishmen 'Paddy'. The terms are affectionate and in no way perceived as derogatory by either party. The terms may be used by any of one, of any other, e.g., a Scotsman may call a Welshman 'Taff' and vice versa. There doesn't seem to be an equivalent for an Englishman, possibly because they have historically been in the majority in most services. Ian Dunster (talk) 12:47, 5 November 2008 (UTC)

'Jock', 'Taffy' and 'Paddy' are very offensive terms these days..and I suspect many of those on the receiving end weren't too happy being called them 50-60 years ago, if we're honest. I'm sure West Indian servicemen were called similar names but there was hardly a culture in the 40s of minority groups expressing their displeasure at this sort of thing. To say these terms are 'affectionate and in no way percieved as derogatory by either party' is far from the truth. Vauxhall1964 (talk) 13:30, 7 June 2009 (UTC)

Vauxhall-

"Taff", "Paddy" and especially "Jock" are very much in evidence in HM Forces today, and are not regarded as being offensive in any way. As a "Jock" and member of the RNR, I (and those I serve with) personally don't find it an assault on my wellbeing or ego in any way - in fact, the line infantry take it as a compliment. The terms as described are no more offensive, and are on exactly the same level, as regimental nicknames. Or, in another way, it is like any Briton referring to "Geordies" or "Scousers". There is no such thing as an ethnic Scotsman, Irishman or, indeed, Englishman in the same way that there is an ethnic "Indian" from the sub-continent. I hope this first-hand information will correct you. Refer yourself to the Army Rumour Service forum for further clarification if you need it.

Thanks - I do get a bit pissed-off with so-called 'experts' trying to re-write history. It's surprising that someone such as the previous poster who regarded the nicknames as derogatory has the cheek to comment on something about which they obviously know nothing. There's a whole lot of 'political correctness' around nowadays, and the adherents to such a principle delight in seeing offence in everything. It's funny that the RAF, probably the most multi-racial organisation on earth at that time, should be the subject of criticism from someone who, if his signature is to be believed, wasn't even born then. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.49.1 (talk) 19:11, 16 February 2010 (UTC)

Water supply

"As a final act of defiance, the retreating Germans cut the water supply to the camp, making it hard for the Allied troops to treat the ill prisoners." I would like a source for that. As far as I understand it, water supply had been irregular for quite some time before the liberation. Which was said to be one of the reasons for the typhus epidemic that raged through the camp. I think I've read somewhere that the German guards explained the shortage of water with something like "The pipes had been cut", which doesn't necessarily mean that the Germans themselves had cut the pipes. 83.248.183.68 (talk) 20:45, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

I've added a source for that claim - anyone want to tell me to reference a specific page? --DuLithgow (talk) 11:37, 28 June 2009 (UTC)

I just checked that out. A single secondary source. Could be anecdotal or even invented. (I could write a book with any crap in it. Doesn't make it a historical source.) It's valueless unless it can be linked to verifiable primary source. Shephard was a producer on World at War which assured us that the stories of atrocities in East Prussia were Nazi propaganda and "the Russians acted as liberators, not conquerors". So much for his reliability.

And even if it's true, the "final act of defiance" is POV. They may not have cut off the supply just to the camp; it may have been to the whole area. Cutting off utility supplies to areas controlled by the enemy is a normal and legitimate act of war. Channelwatcher (talk) 22:20, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

These were war crimes, and the prisoners in the camps were civilians. I've restored the non-apologetic non-whitewashed wording. Jayjg ^(talk) 01:28, 21 January 2010 (UTC)

Banksy?

This link to the Belsen diary on this site is inoperative - correct? delete? Also, I wonder if this artist actually rates a mention in the text of the article - seems like a very minor figure.20:32, 26 May 2009 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.183.187.193 (talk)

You are right, although some secondary web sources such as Little James and Brian Sewell's still work. I think it should therefore be de-linked. Un-topicality may deem it worthy of deletion altogether before long. Such are the dictates of fashion in modern art (patronage by Sewell notwithstanding)? Martinevans123 (talk) 21:28, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

liberation

I have met survivor and bought a book that she had wrote about experiences during time in bergen Belsen and other camps, and in regards to Belsen after liberation (15th April 1945), The SS were made to look after prisoners, white armbands with red cross on them, forced to bury the dead, look after them on the trains back home(many could not control bowels)keeping clean and comfortable, this lady also believed they were treated with D.D.T by British and in the final weeks conditions declined further , bread rations less than a slice a day and then none, only food a cup of soup and then the water stopped, she believed they were determined to kill them by natural means so as not be charged with murder, and that the British quickly restored water and even after British entered camp, there was still Hungarian and German SS, prowling around armed killing prisoners .... book is called Auschwitz to Australia by Olga Horak. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 121.44.65.92 (talk) 02:25, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

treated with D.D.T by British

Many of the inmates were infested with lice and DDT was the only effective way of killing them (the lice). Most of the inmates' clothes had to be later burned for the same reason.

BTW, that Michael Bentine quote with a 'Citation needed' tag was from Bentine's The Long Banana Skin - New English Library - 1976 - ISBN 0-450-02882-8. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.112.75.103 (talk) 15:36, 26 December 2010 (UTC)

Edit request from VampaVampa, 20 December 2010: a typo to be corrected

{{edit semi-protected}} The line 2 of the paragraph 4, just above the contents chart, has a misspelt name "Auswitzch" instead of "Auschwitz", even though the link leads to the relevant article. VampaVampa (talk) 03:39, 20 December 2010 (UTC)

Fixed, thanks. Jayjg ^(talk) 03:57, 20 December 2010 (UTC)