Sixty years ago today, the BBC's Richard Dimbleby entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp with British troops. Here is his actual radio report from that time as used in an audio slide show:
A photo and excerpt of the text:
"Here, over an acre of ground, lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which, except perhaps by a convulsive moment or the last quiver of a sigh from a living skeleton too weak to move."
From Yad Vashem (the Israeli Holocaust memorial):
On April 15, British forces liberated the Bergen-Belsen camp. The British soldiers were horror-stricken at the spectacle that greeted them. They found some 60,000 human beings alive under appalling conditions. Most of them were seriously ill. Alongside them were thousands of unburied corpses, strewn in every direction, and vast numbers of emaciated bodies in mass graves and piles. Because the British Army was not geared to treat everyone who needed assistance, 14,000 additional prisoners died in the first few days and a similar number perished in the following weeks. The British forces began to treat and rehabilitate the rest of the survivors.
Links:
Addendum:
Here is an excerpt from an April 14 BBC Online story on Holocaust denial:
... In the 21st Century, as these events recede into history and the number of Holocaust survivors dwindles, there are still people who deny these crimes happened - and it is a tendency that some experts say is growing.
"Holocaust revisionism is spreading, and not only among neo-Nazis," Kate Taylor, of the anti-fascist publication Searchlight, told the BBC News website.
"As survivors are increasingly dying out it is much easier to hijack history for whatever cause or purpose."
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COUNTRIES WITH LAWS AGAINST HOLOCAUST DENIAL
Austria
Belgium
Czech Republic
France
Germany
Israel
Lithuania
Poland
Slovakia
Switzerland |
While publications peddling Holocaust denial were previously confined to the race-hate paraphernalia of extremist groups, the same material is now readily available on the web.
One of the earliest and most infamous publications denying the Holocaust was a 32-page pseudo-academic booklet entitled Did Six Million Really Die?, first printed in England in 1974.
It dismisses concentration camps as "mythology", rejects the Diary of Anne Frank as a hoax and claims Jews were not exterminated but rather emigrated from Nazi Germany with the help of a benevolent government.
The booklet was widely banned but has resurfaced in electronic form on the internet.