Belsen and the BBC: What Wireless Listeners Learned

As the Allies advanced across the Low Countries in 1944, experts in psychological warfare moved in their wake, bringing Britain's propaganda effort right up to Germany's borders. Patrick Gordon Walker - an Oxford don before the war, who would later become a prominent Labour politician - was part of this campaign. As the BBC European Service's German specialist he had, since 1941, provided a formidable daily output of news and features to Germany.

In late 1944 he and his colleagues found themselves in demand by the newly-formed Psychological Warfare Department under the joint AngloAmerican-Canadian command of SHAEF (Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force). Their brief was to use Radio Luxembourg, the newly-captured powerful radio station on the Continent, to broadcast to the 12.5 million foreign workers estimated to be living and working in Germany.

Gordon Walker arrived in Luxembourg on October 21st, 1944, to a rapturous welcome from those who had regularly tuned into his BBC programmes. With the battlefront just ten miles away, and events moving fast, lie spent the next six months using liaison officers, translators and interpreters to provide news commentaries and classical and light entertainment from dawn until one in the morning.

On April 17th, 1945 he and his American driver, Sergeant Princie, took a recording van for a 'dash into Germany' which ended up being a 1,250-mile trip. They headed first for Brunswick where an English captain showed them the terrifying detritus of the Wollenbüttel prison - torture instruments and a guillotine. A rough memorial had been put up to the 550 prisoners who had been executed there. They were shown a Czech and a Polish prisoner - in an appalling state of malnutrition.

The next day they tried to reach a camp at Salzwedel, but were turned back, and so spent an extra day in Brunswick, recording its citizens: a lawyer who had defended political prisoners; and the Bürgermeister, whose interview was 'long, nervously delivered, unclear and self-justificatory. I did not form a good impression of the man.'

They arrived at Celle, 30 kilometres from Belsen, on April 20th, and the following day drove to the camp. Five days had passed since the first of these had entered Belsen. Conditions in the camp had deeply shocked the liberators - many wrote heartfelt letters home to their loved ones about what they had seen; others were unable to speak of it for the rest of their lives.

Today we know why it was that Belsen was so abysmally overcrowded and why so many thousands had starved to death. Prisoners from camps in Poland had been force marched or transported west - out of reach of the path of the advancing Russian troops. As a result the numbers in the already crowded camp nearly tripled in the first three months of 1945.

What levels of knowledge would Gordon Walker have found among the British soldiers who guided him on his arrival there? It has been said that British press reports of Belsen at the time failed to give a lull account of what the camp signified, and in particular did not acknowledge the high proportion of Jewish inmates. Newspaper accounts were limited by the fact that most journalists visited for one day only - and had little time for in-depth interviews and analysis.

But in the camp itself, soldiers and relief workers - who had been specially reinforced by Jewish personnel - had started to grasp what had happened to thousands of the inmates. As one Jewish relief worker commented:

The camp which is spoken of most frequently... and with the most dread, is Auschwitz, and it was here that many of the internees were branded with their numbers.

Nor were the liberators naive about the fact that 'official agendas' were likely to ensure that certain facts were censored. A captain in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers reported:

I've been talking today to our officer who has been organising the water supply to a concentration camp. Here are some details that were not given in the account on the wireless tonight. 40 per cent were Jews. The bulk of the inmates were Germans but most nationalities including British and American were represented. There were no lavatory arrangements whatever in the camp and most of the inmates had dysentery.

One of the Intelligence Corps officers who was Jewish, Arnold Horwell, was allowed to give special briefings to the press and others arriving at the camp - a clear recognition, it would seem, that the specifics of the Jewish survivors' situation needed to be made clear.

Gordon Walker set to work. He called several members of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry, the first British soldiers to enter the camp, together in a tent and interviewed them as a group - perhaps to obtain more relaxed responses. In his fluent German he interviewed Anita Lasker and her sister Renate, and several others, including Hetty Werkendamm, a fifteen-year old Dutch girl whose father had been half strangled by the SS and made to shovel human excreta in 'the shit pit': 'the little girl's stories went on endlessly'.

His tapes have survived although sometimes with little documentation. One captures the moment when a survivor was reunited with his wife the man sobbing terribly. The wife is not heard - her appearance may be guessed at.

Two survivors were recorded in English - Gitta Cartagena and Helen Kulka, both originally from Czechoslovakia, and both saved from the gas chambers at Auschwitz by being sent to join labour detachments in Hamburg. Helen Kulka described how the camp had been dominated by the gas 'camera' (chamber) which Gordon Walker got her to explain - 'it's an odd word in English' - for the benefit of his British listeners.

As Gordon Walker made his way around the camp a pattern emerged:

Over and over again I was told the same story - of the parades at which people stood naked for hours and were picked out arbitrarily (allegedly incapable of work) for the gas chamber and crematoriums, where many were burnt alive. Only a person in perfect health survived. Life and death was a question of pure chance.

Word got around that Walker would record messages to relatives which would then be broadcast on the BBC. (Messages to relatives of German prisoners of war had been an important feature of the German Service's output, so Gordon Walker was familiar with the drill for this.) Anita Lasker later recalled that it was no easy task to be confronted by a microphone, but with repeated transmissions the message that she and Renate were alive in Belsen camp eventually reached their third sister, Marianne, in Britain.

That evening Gordon Walker recorded the first eve of Sabbath service:

A group of a hundred or so in the open air, amid the corpses. The padre read the service in English and Hebrew. No eye was dry. Certainly not mine. Most of the celebrants were in unconcealed floods of tears.

The following Saturday morning, he recorded another Jewish service where 'all around women and men burst into tears and cried openly'.

Then we collected the orchestra together. They had got their instruments from the old tamp band. Some of them played very well. They loved old jazz and played such tunes as 'I can't give you anything but love'.

The mood to play was infectious the atmosphere in the camp must have been quite extraordinary at this point - and Gordon Walker collected together some Russian girls and Dutch hoys to sing. The Russians sang partisan songs, and the Dutch a specially-composed short song The English: long may they live in glory'.

On the last evening Gordon Walker was allowed to visit some of the Nazi guards held in custody. With a borrowed pistol, and back-up from the British military, he tried to find an SS member prepared to talk. A doctor who had been at Auschwitz tried to claim that he had only tended the sick, but another - a Rumanian - agreed to talk. A woman prisoner, Elisabeth Volkenrath - who had overseen Auschwitz-Birkenau's women's camp and subsequently held a similar post in Belsen - was also, with considerable difficulty, persuaded to speak on tape.

During his time at the camp Gordon Walker realized that the rescue effort of the British medical personnel was not progressing as fast as it should. The concluding passages of his diary entry on Belsen are prefaced with the words 'FROM HERE ON NOT FOR PUBLICATION' and document the 'serious shortcomings' which delayed decisions such as the evacuation of the camp to a nearby military training school 'with houses and space' which was delayed by a full week. 'The main cause was that there was no person in the camp who was of high enough authority to take decisions and to put in his requests to the proper authorities.' He emphasizes in a later paragraph that 'it's a question of decision and authority'.

A report in 224 Military Government Detachment's war diary shows that there had indeed been 'frequent changes of command' and that the lack of higher authority had meant that fewer lives were saved than might have been.

Gordon Walker left Belsen on the Sunday morning, April 22nd, and drove to the virtually flattened town of Hamin, where eight out often of the population were living in cellars. In the days that followed he wrote up his visit to Germany as The Lid Lifts, for the publisher Victor Gollancz, finishing the first draft just as news came of Germany's unconditional surrender. His Belsen progamme was assembled and broadcast on the evening of Sunday May 27th, 1945, as Belsen: Facts and Thoughts.

Although the organizational failings of the rescuers had been perplexing, it would have been unthinkable to mention such shortcomings on air, and the programme's overall thrust was to highlight the British Army's role in saving lives and the gratitude felt by the camp's inmates. It opened with 'God Save the King' played on Belsen's canteen piano by Fania Fenelon (one of the 'musicians of Auschwitz' who later wrote a book about that camp's orchestra) and closed with the children's songs and three 'hip-hip-hoorahs' for the British.

Two witness statements feature. Driver Mechanic Payne of the Oxfordshire Yeomanry describes seeing a woman who had completely lost her mind and who insisted on feeding milk to her long dead baby. Gitta Cartagena tells of her certainty in Auschwitz that she would be gassed and how she kept a record with notches on her bunk post of the days she had left to live.

Elizabeth Volkenrath's testimony in German was not used. The fact that she was in custody and awaiting trial in any case prohibited it.

The Jewish Sabbath open-air service conducted by 'the Jewish Padre' Leslie Hardman is given several minutes. A moving observation by Gordon Walker - that everyone was in tears at the service but struggled on to show the outside world that they were still alive - was omitted from the final recording. However, his thoughts on the German camps and what they meant are given considerable time in the programme:

Whoever of us has shut his ears to these things, or flinched from whatever effort was necessary to put an end to them - now carries part of the responsibility for these things ...

Knowing the extent of material which Gordon Walker uncovered, one looks - with the benefit of hindsight of course - for more signs of understanding of the Jewish tragedy. On his last night in the camp he had spoken privately with Leslie Hardman, who 'broke down and sobbed out loud' - a heart-rending moment which made it into The Lid Lifts, but not into the BBC programme. Gordon Walker knew that many of the prisoners had been marched to Belsen, but he did not attempt to build up a picture of this wretched forced migration of prisoners from Auschwitz and other camps in the east to the western part of Germany. He perhaps felt that the recordings needed no further embellishment or conjecture, and that it was simply too early to provide a full perspective:

In my diary I have set down things as I observed them as honestly as I could... For this is, I think, the best service you can give to a democracy at the moment on the German problem. To give the facts as accurately as possible and to let each draw his conclusions. But the diary method produces a jigsaw that is still in its box. The representative observer has one further task - to fit together some corner and sections of the jigsaw that belong together. This is still in the realm of fact reporting.

The programme got a favourable reaction, according to the BBC Listeners' Report, with three out of four of the 9 o'clock News audience listening to it.

Its APPRECIATION INDEX was 83...the recordings of the British Soldier's evidence, the singing of the children, the Jewish service, and the Czech girl's story were all singled out for praise, as was Patrick Cordon Walker's narration.

Realizing that the children's songs offered an unusual child's perspective on freedom from Nazi tyranny, Gordon Walker wrote a further talk based solely on these, which he suggested to the BBC programmers for Children's Hour. It was broadcast on June 14th, 1945, giving younger Home Service listeners their own version of the horrific news story. 'That was the message in song,' Gordon Walker closed the programme,

... of these children from this terrible concentration camp to the children in Britain. I suppose they are the saddest songs you will ever hear. All these Russian and Dutch children had lost their fathers and mothers, murdered by the Nazis.

The following year, as the first anniversary of Belsen's liberation approached, the BBC broadcast the first full-length drama documentary based on life in the Nazi camps, when the Home Service dramatized the experiences of a British survivor of Belsen, Harold Le Druillenec. It was written and produced by Leonard Cottrell - who in later decades would find fame as the author of several popular histories of the ancient world.

Le Druillenec, a schoolmaster in Jersey, had been arrested, together with his sister, Louisa Gould, for helping to shelter an escaped Russian prisoner of war. His trial took place just two weeks after the Normandy landings - the sounds of the fighting on the nearby French coast could actually be heard in the St Helier courtroom - but the Nazi administration were still sending convicted Channel Islanders to the French mainland, and Le Druillenec was taken off the island to begin his five-month sentence in a prison near Rheims. From there he was sent to the concentration camp at Neuengamme, on the outskirts of Hamburg, and then to a slave labour detachment in the naval port of Wilhelmshaven. As the Allies approached, he was transported to Belsen, arriving there on April 5th, 1945.

After the liberation, Le Druillenec had been nursed back to health in a hospital in Epsom, Surrey. His voice was briefly heard on the Home Service when the Belsen Trial - at which he was a witness - was reported from Lüneberg. Then on Christmas Day 1945, he was heard by millions of wireless listeners in Britain and abroad when he broadcast live from Castle Cornet in Guernsey on Wherever You May Be - an hour-long sharing of greetings from different countries which directly preceded George VI's Christmas message.

Cottrell presumably interviewed Le Druillenec at length and drew from these conversations a narrative and a cast of characters. The 'little band of Friends' Le Druillenec had made during his captivity officer'; shape the piece: Colonel Reynaud, a First World War veteran and 'very much the old type of cavalry officer'; the bluff, sturdy American, Lloyd Gybels, who advised newly arrived inmates not to 'judge things by the standards of ordinary life'; the pale aristocrat Jean de Frotté whose privileged background made him least adaptable to the privations of camp life; and 'little Baudu', a Breton tattle-breeder whose humanity and resourcefulness helped keep the others going.

The BBC gave the play a strong cast, including Valentine Dyall (familiar to wireless listeners as 'The Man in Black' in the long-running thriller series Appointment with Fear). Le Druillenec was persuaded to participate as narrator. A musical score was commissioned from William Alwyn, and Eugene Pini, the well-known violinist, was engaged to play il. Sound effects were briefed to produce a hissing steam train, marching feet, the hum of planes and the distant thud of bombs.

Quite a large group of actors, musicians and technical staff, therefore, gathered with Cottrell and Le Druillenec in Bush House's Studio 8 on April 11th, 1946, for two days' rehearsals, culminating in the live broadcast on the evening of Friday 12th, three days before the first anniversary of Belsen's liberation.

To listen to the feature today is to experience a highly accomplished piece of radio - its spare construction and fluid dialogue make for a timeless and moving piece. Listeners hear the angry surprise of Le Druillenec and his fellow prisoners as their train slows down and they realize that they are being taken to a concentration camp. In measured tones Le Druillenec explains how concentration camps were well organized and run with efficiency, how their inmates had their belongings confiscated and were made to lose their identity.

I want you to imagine the scene: Naked men - all nationalities moving forward in a crocodile. Trousers, tunic, shirt, clogs. Trousers, tunic, shirt, clogs. Trousers, tunic, shirt, clogs. All with the characteristic stripes.

The Block leader Omar barks at them 'like a vicious public school headmaster': 'From now on yon have to be concerned with furthering the interests of the Third Reich.'

The American character, Lloyd Gybels, has been in Neuengamme for some while, and knows the rules of camp life:

You'll see things going on here that'll drive you nuts if you try to Figure them out - guys beaten to death for stealing a swede; guys tortured for weeks and then killed because the Camp Chief didn't like their laces ...

The past history of the Block leader, Omar, is used to show how camp inmates were worn down and debased. Omar had once been a radical journalist but the camp system had taken away bis values and made him a monster.

In the second half of the drama, Le Druillenec is transported in a cattle wagon to Lünebeig where the train is bombed by American planes, and the inmates of an adjoining wagon are killed. Colonel Reynaud, Bauclu and Le Druillenec are packed into a truck and driven to another camp - Belsen.

They know their situation is serious: the buildings next to their hut are crammed with dead bodies. And more convoys of prisoners are arriving all the time.

Le Druillenec narrates the painful progress of the next ten days: on the second night the huts are so crowded they have to sit 'with legs apart, the next man between your knees'; on the sixth day the SS order them to start dragging the bodies to pits for burial; on the eighth, Colonel Reynaud dies; on the ninth, Le Druillenec says 'I am finished.'

But on the truth day distant rifle shots are beard, and Baudu shakes his friend and tells him that the British are coming. At the end of the programme Le Druillenec manages to convey to Derrick Sington, the officer in charge of the Loudspeaker Unit who has announced the liberation of the camp, that he is British, and is driven away on the bonnet of the loudspeaker van, Baudu shouting out to him: 'Goodbye Harold, you'll write to me, won't you?'

The performance of the play's final moments must have been extraordinary to witness - with Harold Le Druillenec describing his ordeal of just a year past, the passing of each day marked by the soaring notes of Eugene Pini's violin.

The programme did not portray the years of imprisonment and degradation in Auschwitz that had been the experience of many of Belsen's inmates prior to their arrival there. Nor did it make clear the fact that so many of the prisoners had been Jewish. Being delivered in unaccented English, moveover, it sounds strange when compared to the testimonies given in later years by 'continental Britons'. But as an attempt to explore the concentration camp experience it was a thoughtful and professional piece.

What, then, do these two programmes tell us about the BBC and its approach to the revelations made at Belsen in 1945? There is no doubt that the terrible facts were seen, certainly by the European Service, first and foremost as a story to be brandished at the defeated Germans:

The European Service must give the fullest possible attention today to the concentration camps. Bullock will write a special report which should be run at some length. Establish the war guilt. This was the system which the quislings supported and was the basis of the Nazi regime. Show that this was the justification for the war.

But the news controllers also acknowledged that the wider story was not a straightforward one:

In fact the guilt spreads over us all. Even Britain, who declared war on this evil before she was herself directly attacked and who did so much to secure the victory should not forget that she herself negotiated with Adoll Hitler in 1938, turning a blind eye to Buchenwald and Dachau and the Jewish pogroms, and that a British trade delegation was visiting Germany when the Nazi pestilence was taken into Czechoslovakia. This is not to induce an exaggerated feeling of self-reproach but only to show that the essential evil is Nazism and that it is not only the German people who need to walk through these prison camps.

And they knew that a large part of it had yet to be told:

While we are giving the details as we learn them about the concentration camps in Germany, it should not be forgotten that the extermination camps in Poland were even more frightful and that there millions of people were slaughtered.

Gordon Walker's Facts and Thoughts shows that - within the limitations of a short programme and to a degree constrained by the mood of triumph in spring 1945 - a serious effort was made to get beyond the horrific images of the first reports, and to explore the identity and experiences of Belsen's inmates. The phenomenon of 'the concentration camp' was a new, dark arrival in Europe's history, and - as the elaborate production The Man from Belsen shows - the best brains and talents were put to help public understanding of it.