As the German war machine finally collapsed in the April 1945 the true horrors of the Holocaust were laid bare for all to see.
For many in the English-speaking world, the 12-minute radio report by Richard Dimbleby of the BBC on the liberation of the concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was the first eye-witness account of the Holocaust. This was followed by newsreels in the days following.
Dimbleby’s usual clipped BBC delivery was not on show, instead a voice cracking with emotion set out what was an unimageable scene of horror, with thousands of men, women and children left to die in their own filth by the Nazi regime. It was so graphic and shocking that at first the BBC mandarins refused to let the report air. It wasn’t until Dimbleby threatened resignation that it was broadcast.
But as horrifying as Bergen-Belsen undoubtedly was, it was just one of hundreds of concentration and extermination camps across Europe. The evil of the Holocaust had been exposed but not yet it’s true scale.
Even late on in the war, the murder of an estimated six million people, mostly jews but also others deemed not worthy of life by the Third Reich, was beyond the comprehension of most allied troops and civilians alike.
Allied government’s, though, had been made aware of the growing holocaust as early as 1942 and again and in more detail later thanks to information smuggled out of and escapees from the most notorious death camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau.
From the ‘Holocaust of bullets’, where the Nazi Einsatzgruppen killing squads took the lives of over a million people as the Wehrmacht swept through Russia and the Baltics from 1941, through the first deployment of gas trucks at camps such as Chelmo to the industrial slaughter in the gas chambers of the Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor extermination camps; Hitler’s Germany murdered on a scale never seen in human history.
Even as the Third Reich shrank to nothing with the Allies closing in on Berlin, many emaciated victims were beaten and shot on death marches in sub-zero temperatures.
At 8 pm on 27 January, Holocaust Memorial Day, people around the globe are being invited to light a candle in memory of the six million victims of the Third Reich’s Final Solution.