It's been 80 years since the first images of the Bergen Belsen concentration camp emerged. Among those who were first to see and experience the horror of the camp was a Tuam man
By Mary Burke
EIGHTY years on from the ending of the Second World War, time dims our memories of the unimaginable horrors of the Nazi death camps.
In April 1945, Europe was weary, five years of death and destruction was finally coming to an end but in the waning weeks of the war, the first images of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp were released, and they shocked the world.
When British and Canadian troops of the 11th Armoured Division liberated Belsen on Sunday, April 15, they were utterly unprepared for what they found. War correspondent Richard Dimbleby accompanied the Division across Europe and entered Belsen on April 17. His BBC report on the camp was so graphic that his superiors initially refused to believe it or broadcast it and only did so after he threatened to resign.
Herbert Kenny, an ordinary working-class man from Manchester whose great-grandfather Thomas emigrated from Galway, was an army dispatch rider and the first British soldier to push open the wooden gates “to hell” as he later described the scenes that met him and his platoon.
The scale of the human suffering inflicted on the inmates caused such anguish that he remained silent about its horrors until 1985. Seventy-two-year-old Herbert spoke about his experience to a young reporter of a local Manchester newspaper describing his mental health breakdown after enduring two weeks in Belsen. Hospitalised with depression, he was discharged from the army with no pension as it was ruled his illness was not attributable to his war service.
Tuam man Dr Francis Raymond Waldron from High Street also had the unique distinction of being in charge of the first medical unit to drive through those gates later that same momentous day. He too was greatly affected by his experience and rarely spoke of it.
In every Belsen eyewitness record, appalling scenes were described. Photographers accompanied soldiers into the camp and their harrowing images bear witness to the horror. Thousands of emaciated unburied bodies lay strewn around the camp in various stages of decomposition. The stench was unbearable.
Rows of green wooden huts contained critically ill people, packed together without food or water. The barely living, the dying and the dead all mingled together in the stifling heat, starving, sick and completely without hope. Victims of neglect, torture and ill treatment.
Located near Celle in Northern Germany, Belsen was not a designated death camp but was initially established in 1940 to house Allied prisoners of war. In 1943, it was turned into a concentration camp by the German authorities.
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