Talk:Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

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Contents 1 Requested move 1.1 Voting 2 Was there a gas chamber at Belsen? 3 Channel 4 (UK commercial TV) program "The Relief Of Belsen", 9.00-11.05 pm Monday 15 October 2007 4 How to pronounce "Belsen"? 5 Semi-protect?

Please view another photo at de:KZ Bergen-Belsen

[Entrance] herewith licensed under GFDL

thx ;-)

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Thank you for making the move, Nightstallion. As per Lysy's suggestion above, I've now converted the Bergen-Belsen redirect page into a disambiguation page. David Kernow 14:11, 21 January 2006 (UTC)

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This camp was in Germany - I believe the latest historical consensus is that no gassings occurred in Germany proper in spite of what witnesses may claim. There were several other witnesses who contradict the historical consensus besides the gas immune boy and the soldier. The article should not try to imply a history that no reputable historian will support. The link mentioning the two eyewitnesses to gassing is scrapbooks - appears to be an unreliable source - no historian from either camp verifies much/most of their information. Very emotionally intense but light on facts and truth.

Search the web with "Kramer,belsen,etc" - you will find several articles of some scholarly merit, far removed from this propaganda piece.159.105.80.63 13:49, 15 March 2007 (UTC)

Concernig negotiations over the camp - no mention that DDT was used after liberation, not released for use during the war. The Allies had DDT throughout the war, dropping DDT for camp use ( the Russians neede it too ) would have stopped most deaths - of course the Germans could have fought longer and harder.159.105.80.141 13:42, 27 March 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Was there a gas chamber at Belsen?

I've removed this section, as it seems to be giving undue weight to a minority view, based on sources which are objectively very poor. One comes from a who-he website, and quotes (without citation) a remembered converstion of thirty years earlier, the other is to a Canadian local paper reporting the comments of someone who claimed to have survived six attempts at gassing. Neither of these are particularly credible, to put it mildly. Extraordinary claims require an extraordinary level of proof. Since the bulk of sources say B-B had no gas chamber, adding this section based on these weak sources is unjustified. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 22:28, 3 April 2007 (UTC)

• I have restored the section, and then commented it out, pending discussion.

What is a "who-he website"?

This source seems to be as valid as many other reports of events that long ago. Among the very distressing job of clearing up after liberation, there were more things to do than making a detailed description of every installation and bit of equipment found. A smallish underground gas chamber may well have gone unnoticed, or thought in error at the time to be an ordinary cellar.

It seems possible to me that one among so many had a genetic mutation that made him immune to the gas used. Genetic oddities happen occasionally.

Anthony Appleyard 06:20, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

By a who-he website I mean one written by random persons, rather than one by a scholarly organisation such as USHMM or Yad Vashem.

The source is of very low reliability, because the claim of the soldier's son is reported from a book, but the book is not cited, so it is not verifiable by anyone. The excerpt also makes it clear that the son is remembering (after a gap of 20-30 years) what his father told him 30 years after the war. The likelyhood of misremembering on the part of the father or the son is reasonably high.

The attitude of the Allies during the invasion of Germany was that the perpetrators of crimes against peace and humanity were to be punished. It is unlikely that unknown facilities were destroyed immediately as they would constitute evidence.

The chance of a mutation which would allow respiration unaffected by carbon monoxide or hydrogen cyanide is negligible, and in any case, if someone wasn't gassed successfully they would almost certainly have been (a) shot or (b) sent for mediacl experimentation. Not gassed another *five* times and allowed to escape. Much more likely than this is that the victim's mental health had broken down and they believed that things had happened which had not.

To sum up, neither of these stories can be given much weight. The sources fail reliable sources and verifiability, and there is a prima facie implausibility about the gassing survivor account. Squiddy | (squirt ink?) 09:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)

In the 1945 trial for Belsen a doctor testified that thousands were gassed in one night. Why do the historians not believe the witnesses about German camps, but believe witnesses about Polish camps - no better testimony. All the German camps have progassing witnesses - who, what evidence moved the chambers out of Germany?159.105.80.141 17:25, 9 April 2007 (UTC)

Cite your source - and there were no gas chambers at all in Belsen. We have the plans, we have the eye-witnesses and we have the film and photos and more eyewitnesses from its liberation. No gassings. That was done in the East. Darkmind1970 15:32, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

As for Germany, there were chambers of T-4 (operating also later) and possibly some "experimental" at the camps (also dissinfection chambers). --HanzoHattori 20:27, 17 April 2007 (UTC)

Sources - this article - Simon Wisenthal - Martin Broszat - etc - other than the Nuremberg trials and a couple of eyewitnesses this story fell on its face years ago. Nizkor even lists it under " A tale of ..."159.105.80.141 19:25, 8 May 2007 (UTC)

Precisely - its a case of a dubious source for Bergen-Belsen. There were no gas chambers in the place, and no historian has ever claimed that there were any. Just thousands of people being crammed into unsanitary huts in hideous conditions and being treated with total indifference and contempt by their guards as they died. You could smell the place a mile off. I shudder just thinking about it. Darkmind1970 08:18, 14 May 2007 (UTC)

The conditions were certainly hideous and insanitary, but do you have any source for your assertion that they were "treated with total indifference and contempt by their guards as they died"? It's perfectly possible of course, but isn't it equally possible that with 60,000 seriously ill and dying prisoners, and no sanitation, water, food or medicine (the civilian populations of Germany and Holland were starving too) the guards were simply overwhelmed and terrified of catching typhus themselves? There were many more prisoners than the site had been intended to house as a result of evacuation of Auschwitz and other eastern camps. These prisoners brought the typhus with them into Belsen. 78.147.100.109 05:50, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

There was a deliberate German policy of starvation in Holland, but while conditions were very hard in Germany there was no famine there - food was still coming down from places like Denmark. Belsen was far too smell for the numbers of people being jammed into it - but they were poured in anyway by the authorities. I would describe that as indifference and contempt. Darkmind1970 10:49, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll accept the point on famine in Germany. It was perhaps an overstatement. I don't have the knowledge. But the infrastructure was breaking down with the mass retreat from the east and Allied bombing of communications, and food was certainly scarce; I would think that feeding prisoners was low on the list of Nazi priorities at this point in the war (as feeding Indian civilians was for the British in the WW 2 Bengal famine). The massive overcrowding was not down to the guards, who cannot be blamed for mass of sick, starving and lice-infested prisoners pouring in from the eastern camps as they were evacuated. And what were the authorities supposed to do? Turn the prisoners loose in the countryside? The British didn't do this.

But this is getting OT as we are no longer discussing the article. 89.240.229.252 22:29, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Channel 4 (UK commercial TV) program "The Relief Of Belsen", 9.00-11.05 pm Monday 15 October 2007

• This British TV program on Channel 4 [1] [2] was a filmed reconstruction of events there at liberation and after, using genuine old footage for scenes with prisoners in. It claimed that:
  • "Belsen had 2 camps: Camp 1 was the concentration camp, Camp 2 was used for other purposes. Camp 2 was adapted into a hospital, and that hospital is still open." The underlined text seems to contradict the article, which says that Bergen-Belsen DP camp was vacated in 1951. Did Channel 4 get it wrong? Or what? Was the hospital moved rather than closed down? Who is right? Anthony Appleyard 05:11, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

I've removed the entire section about this. Do you know how many books over the last 60 years have been written about Belsen? Devoting so much detail to this programme trivialises Belsen. It was also in abysmal English. Jooler 20:12, 16 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] How to pronounce "Belsen"?

• I am English. Every time I have heard the name Belsen, it was pronounced "Belssen". But this page's Russian equivalent transcribes it as Бельзен (= Bel'zen). Anthony Appleyard (talk) 06:56, 14 December 2007 (UTC)

• • Hi Anthony, I am English although speak and write in the Cyrillic alphabet also. The Russian translation you have as Бельзен is actually translated as (= Beleazen) ь sounds like ea in the word EArings. Hope this helps in some way. (talk) 16:31, 30 April 2008

[edit] Semi-protect?

• semi-protect. High level of IP vandalism. Syrenab (talk) 16:40, 13 March 2008 (UTC)
• I semiprotected page Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Anthony Appleyard (talk) 17:25, 13 March 2008 (UTC)