We Sincerely Apologize
[EDITORS’ NOTE: We sincerely pray for your pardon
for the brutality of this post and the accompanying photos.
There are too many photos from
which we might have might have chosen,
but too horrible to even view.
Nonetheless, brutality is what happens when individuals,
governments and political candidates “other” people.
As Americans complete their ballots and prepare for Election Day,
our priestly and prophetic roles demand that we stand against othering.]
In 1985, Mark Hodkinson was a young reporter for the Middleton, Moston and Blackley [Manchester, England] Guardian, when President Ronald Reagan and German Chancellor Helmut Kohl visited the site of the Belsen concentration camp. Kohl accepted Germany’s “historical responsibility for the crimes of the Nazi tyranny. This is reflected not least in never ending shame. We shall not let anything to do with this be falsified or made light of.”
Days later, “A large manila envelope… with ‘Mr. Kenny’ written on the front in black marker” appeared at the newspaper office. Inside was a “typed article of several [13] pages’ length… At the top, in the considered, florid longhand of what I presumed to be an older person, it read in capitals: ‘THE ENTRY OF THE FIRST BRITISH SOLDER IN BELSEN’.”
Buildings of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is burned to the ground to halt the spread of typhus. Germany, May 21, 1945.
Over time, Hodkinson interviewed the sender and what should have been a front page, over-the-fold story that would be picked-up worldwide was buried deep inside – just before the classified ads - and, essentially ignored.
Sixty years later, Hodkinson has published the full story of “Mr. Kenny” and so many like him whose lives – emotion and spiritual, whose souls – were forever imprinted with the horrors they encountered in Belsen – horrors they rarely shared with others after the war.
“I have carried this story for many years, as Herbert did. I have written it because I owe it to him and others, the unknown and unsung, who, across many areas of life, have been burdened indiscriminately by great adversity and grief. They do really walk among us. And their grace, humility and strength is inspirational….” Opening The Gates of Hell: The untold story of Herbert Kenny, the man
who discovered Belsen
Herbert Kenny, Jr. was just two years old when his father went to fight in “the war to end all wars” and a month shy of his seventh birthday when his dad was killed in action in France – two months before the war ended.
Camp survivors wash each other.
At 17, far too young for actual military service, he enlisted with the Royal Tank Corps of the Territorial Army (TA) on January 31, 1930.
He was 23 in 1935 when he married Grace and their third child was born in October 1939. Because he had technical skills needed at home in England’s war effort, he was rejected three times when he attempted to volunteer for military service; he finally lied in order to enlist - saying he was a simple truck driver. “My wife never really forgave me for doing that,” he wrote half a century later.
The young soldier kept a detailed (and often seemingly detached) journal of his unit’s ground battles and his experience of the war as they slogged through France, noting:
“This was war, real war. But it had to be: you cannot let a lot of gangsters dictate and terrorise other people into submission. They have to be stopped and this was what we were there for – to stop them.”
Two survivors in front of women’s barracks in Bergen-Belsen camp.
Because of his background as a truck driver and his innate navigating skills, Kenny was assigned a unique task - corporal dispatch rider of the 35th COY Royal Army Service Corps, mounted on a brand new Matchless motorcycle. As Allied forces pushed north through France, into Belgium and Norway and toward Germany, British maps failed to provide needed information. Kenny was assigned to scout available routes and then return to provide critical information for advancing troops and their commanders. It was a solitary task. And dangerous because he was barely armed and essentially without support.
As the most advanced British soldier in the Allied press into Germany and just outside Celle (north-central Germany), Kenny happened upon a man on a rickety bicycle. “Sprechen Sie Englisch?” the scout asked. “I am from France but I worked for ten years in Glasgow,” the cyclist explained, adding that the was attempting to return home. As he pushed off toward home, the Frenchman asked, “Do you know about the Belsen camp?” and explained it was a death camp administered by the “horrible” Josef Kramer, later dubbed the “Beast of Belsen.”
With information provided by the cyclist, Kenny located the Belsen death camp. According to Hodkinson, on Sunday, April 15, 1945:
“[H]e was about to suffer one of the greatest shocks of anyone who had ever lived. The scale of the atrocity – 60,000 ‘skeletons’ and 13,000 unburied corpses – would not have been immediately apparent, but within seconds he saw hundreds of emaciated bodies and recognised the horror and cruelty that had been perpetrated at the site.”
Josef Kramer, Camp Commandant, in irons at Belsen before being removed to the POW cage at Celle. He was tried and executed for war crimes in December 1945.
Kenny described his first reaction:
“This will shock you. People were walking around with a glazed, empty look in their eyes, so terribly thin that they looked like skeletons, and some who had simply dropped dead right in front of me. I saw thousands in such a terrible state. They were just skin and bone, not an ounce of flesh anywhere. Terrible to see. You are lucky you are reading this and not experiencing it. I saw a grave the size of a football pitch, stacked with emaciated dead bodies, eight feet high. What sort of fiends could do this thing? The inmates were not all Jews, as we are often led to believe. Perhaps they were in the majority, but there were also Polish, German, French, Danes and many others. We rounded up the SS guards, placed them under armed surveillance. I had to take a grip of myself to prevent me going berserk with my Sten [British submachine gun] as I faced them…
Kenny wrote:
“I saw the prisoners shuffling along without hardly any energy in their body to move. That alone was a terrible sight, but there was worse than these poor bodies. They were just skin and bone. It made me wonder how the bones were left together. What had been muscle and tissue was faded ligaments like string, so terribly thin with no flesh to give bulk for support. Just as bad was the look on their faces, a look of despair and hopelessness, waiting for the end…
This wasn’t war. This was a nightmare. The gruesome sights and the smell. There wasn’t much else we could do….”
A view of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp after liberation.
Years later, Sarajevo-born author Hanna Levy-Hass documented her time at Belson:
“We have not died, but we are dead. They have managed to kill in us not only our right to live in the present and for many of us, to be sure, the right to a future life. But what is most tragic is that they have succeeded, with their sadistic and depraved methods, in killing in us all sense of a human life in our past, all feeling of normal human beings endowed with a normal past, up to even the very consciousness of having existed at one time as human beings worthy of this name….”
Hodkinson explained:
“Belsen did not contain the machinery of mass murder; there were no gas chambers. Instead, an estimated 52,000 died of starvation (no one had eaten for two weeks before the British soldiers arrived), disease or from violence inflicted by the SS. In the month before liberation, more than 18,000 had died. There was an acute shortage of food and water, no real sanitation and overcrowding had led to the spread of dysentery, typhoid fever and tuberculosis… Belsen did not contain the machinery of mass murder; there were no gas chambers…
In 2001, Lieutenant-Colonel Douglas Paybody of VIII Corps described it many years later to his local newspaper, the Warrington Guardian:
“What we saw was a nightmare which beggars description. Nobody should be allowed to see the things we saw: thousands of bodies lying all over the place. Excrement everywhere. The stench got into your clothes, your hair, your ears and your mouth. You could empty water over yourselves, but it took ages to get rid of the smell.”
Female prisoners in the newly liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.
Hodkinson attempts to place the reaction of British and other troops into perspective:
“Among Allied soldiers it was known bluntly that ‘the Nazis hated Jews’. Many believed this was without rationale and a manifestation of pure evil. Herbert, in the days after first entering Belsen, thought of those chats he’d had with older workmates, when they had explained how Hitler and his acolytes had manipulated the insecurities of a nation. They [Hitler and the Nazis] had offered strength, unity and leadership at a time of crisis – the end of the ‘Golden Age of Weimar’; the Great Depression; the Wall Street Crash; Germany’s ignominious defeat in World War One etc.
“The wider population had also been united under a policy of scapegoatism. Propaganda had been used to advance a dogma that ‘true’ Germans were Aryans (a mythical master race) of biological purity – tall, broad, fair haired and blue eyed. The Nazis demonised and targeted groups classified as Untermenschen (sub-humans): Jews, Slavs, Roma [often referred to as ‘gypsies’], Sinti (a sub-group of Roma), blacks, communists, trade unionists, beggars, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses and the disabled, of whom more than 200,000 were killed. The persecution of most of these groupings, while risible, was often on an arbitrary basis – they believed that homosexuality, religious or political views (and affiliations) could be abandoned or renounced. There was, however, no conceivable amnesty for anyone of Jewish ethnicity, and the stated aim was the extinction of the entire race. Over two decades, on an insidious basis that served to ‘normalise’ discrimination, Jews were branded as a devious faction of power-brokers, scheming to their own self-interest, a parasite within the body of Germany. They were reviled also for the Judaist belief that, via descent from the ancient Israelites as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy, they were chosen, and selected to be in a covenant with God. The Nazis portrayed this as conceit and a rival statement of ultimate supremacy that had to be vanquished.
A camp inmate delouses his clothes – April 17-18, 1945.
“In their state of shock, Allied soldiers voiced the same words repeatedly, describing the actions of the SS variously as senseless, inhumane, unbelievable, revolting, disgusting and ‘beyond explanation’. They struggled to understand that to the SS, every deed had validation regardless of its barbarity. The British relief teams at Belsen saw incarcerated men, women and children, but the SS pictured vermin of different gender and sizes. Dr Fritz Klein, the camp ‘doctor’ at Belsen, précised this Weltanschauung (world view): ‘My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind. That’s why I cut them out.’….
“The various units of British soldiers returned each night [to their bases]… They were in trauma, so emotionally drained that their limbs felt dissociated from their bodies. They were offered food but couldn’t eat. They slumped to the floor, knees drawn up, backs against the wall. They were unable to properly form sentences. ‘Why, Bert? Why?’ [Kenny] was asked, probably because he was a few years older than most of the other soldiers. He relayed what he’d been told about Hitler and the Nazis… hoping it might clarify why the SS had acted as it had. He was interrupted… ‘Hold on, you’re not trying to justify what these evil fuckers have done, are you?’ As Herbert struggled for the words, another spoke over him. ‘I get what you’re saying, Bert, I do, but,… everyone knows in their soul that it’s fucking wrong, very wrong, to be killing women and kids. I don’t know about you, but if I was asked to do it, I couldn’t. I’d rather put a bullet through my own head.’... Within a few days, most of the British soldiers had started to drink heavily and smoke excessively; for some, the self-medication that would last a lifetime had already begun.”
Wearing protecting clothing, members of the Royal Army Medical Corps evacuate prisoners from Belsen concentration camp.
They are among most heinous words of the Twentieth Century:
“My Hippocratic oath tells me to cut a gangrenous appendix out
of the human body. The Jews are the gangrenous appendix of mankind.
That’s why I cut them out.”
Replace “Jews” with “Haitians,” “Venezuelans,” “LGBT+,” “librarians,” “teachers,” “Blacks,” “Afghans,” or “anybody different from me or of whom I am afraid or disapprove,” “poisoning the blood of our country” and….
Again, we apologize.
But as politicians attempt to “manipulate the insecurities of a nation,” someone must say it!