Bergen Belsen. The memorial wall, with messages in several languages, remembering all the people who perished there. Image: Jason, Openverse
Bergen Belsen. The memorial wall, with messages in several languages, remembering all the people who perished there. Image: Jason, Openverse
The facts of history are sometimes brutal and hard to confront. That our former president should use the same terms as one of the true monsters of that history is something that should make us all cringe.
Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV
One of the readers of this column, Peter Keller, wrote me recently to tell me that his father had served in the American Field Service in Italy at the same time my grandfather commanded the VI Corps and Fifth Army during World War II. Because his father was deaf in one ear, he wasn’t eligible to serve in a combat unit, so he became an ambulance driver for the AFS. He was attached to the British 8th Army in North Africa and then in Italy through the campaign at Monte Cassino and the liberation of Rome. He was assigned to the British Army’s 11th Armored Division near the end of the war and followed them into Germany and was present with his ambulance unit when the armored division liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.
Tens of thousands of Jews had been murdered outright or starved to death at the camp from 1943 through the camp’s liberation in 1945. When the British soldiers reached the camp, they found about 60,000 surviving inmates and more than 13,000 dead bodies, most having perished from starvation or typhus. Peter Keller’s father was one of those who liberated the camp and helped to treat the survivors. This is a portion of a letter Keller’s father wrote home to his grandfather while he was assisting the survivors of the camp. Keller tells me that his father’s handwritten letter was typed up by his grandfather when he received it in May of 1945. Keller explained that his father sent his letters from the war to his grandfather at his place of work so his grandmother would not see them, to spare her his depiction of the horrors they described.
Keller letter excerpt
Peter attached several photos his father had taken during the war and pasted into a scrapbook with captions. The photos show bombed out towns in Italy, but they do not show the horrors of Bergen-Belsen. I found the photos below online to illustrate some of what his father describes in his letter.
This photo shows the scene he describes of German nurses and doctors washing and delousing Jewish survivors of the camp after its liberation.
In this photo, a British bulldozer pushes some of the dead into a mass grave.
Overseen by a British soldier, former Nazi guards are made to gather dead bodies that were lying around the camp two days after the liberation.
This photo shows one of the mass graves where the emaciated bodies of the Jewish inmates were buried.
The history of the horrors of Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps is available in books and some can be found online. But it isn’t often that we are able to read an eyewitness personal account of someone who was there on the day that a concentration camp was liberated. We owe a debt of thanks to the family of Peter Keller for preserving his father’s letter so this terrible history can be known firsthand.
This is the ugly truth behind Donald Trump’s use of Hitler’s words about vermin and poisoned blood. These are the people Hitler was referring to with those words. This is how their blood was spilled and their bodies defiled in service of his Nazi lies and ideology.
That Donald Trump would toss around so casually the very words Hitler used to justify the horrors depicted in the letter and photographs above tells you all you need to know about Trump, his mind, his morals, and the empty place inside him where in another time, crimes like these were conceived and took place.
Lucian K. Truscott IV, a graduate of West Point, has had a 50-year career as a journalist, novelist and screenwriter. He has covered stories such as Watergate, the Stonewall riots and wars in Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan. He is also the author of five bestselling novels and several unsuccessful motion pictures. He has three children, lives in rural Pennsylvania and spends his time Worrying About the State of Our Nation and madly scribbling in a so-far fruitless attempt to Make Things Better.
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