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British Army Sergeant Norman Midgley must have thought he had seen it all by April 1945. Even before the war started, he had seen his fair share of both the best and worst of humanity in his vocation as a staff photographer for the Daily Express newspaper based in Manchester, England. When the war started the British Army therefore had a specific task for him in mind given his experience and expertise; specifically as a member of the Army Film and Photographic Unit.
It was his job to record in pictures the events experienced by British and Commonwealth forces in the fight against the Axis, he and his compatriots being embedded inside frontline British combat units. It was a role no less dangerous than any other soldier on the battlefield and in fact statistically, it was even more so with Midgeley’s unit alone suffering an appalling 1-in-4 casualty rate.
By the time he found himself travelling in a jeep to a remote location being held by the British 11th Armoured Division in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen on April 18th 1945, much of the fighting had begun to die down and instead he found himself with a new task; recording evidence of Nazi crimes. In that regard, he was told he was being taken to something particularly ghastly and inhuman.
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp...
00:00 Introduction
03:13 Early Life
08:14 Auschwitz
11:53 Bergen-Belsen
17:25 Liberation & Trial
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Written & Researched by: Tony Wilkins
Edited by: James Wade
History Should Never Be Forgotten...
It was his job to record in pictures the events experienced by British and Commonwealth forces in the fight against the Axis, he and his compatriots being embedded inside frontline British combat units. It was a role no less dangerous than any other soldier on the battlefield and in fact statistically, it was even more so with Midgeley’s unit alone suffering an appalling 1-in-4 casualty rate.
By the time he found himself travelling in a jeep to a remote location being held by the British 11th Armoured Division in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen on April 18th 1945, much of the fighting had begun to die down and instead he found himself with a new task; recording evidence of Nazi crimes. In that regard, he was told he was being taken to something particularly ghastly and inhuman.
The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp...
00:00 Introduction
03:13 Early Life
08:14 Auschwitz
11:53 Bergen-Belsen
17:25 Liberation & Trial
Prefer to listen on the go? Check out the WotW Podcast:
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4i0FnOKqttgHtbOhgOmLpr
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/wars-of-the-world/id1548691968
Google: https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5idXp6c3Byb3V0LmNvbS85ODg5NjAucnNz
RSS Feed: https://feeds.buzzsprout.com/988960.rss
Written & Researched by: Tony Wilkins
Edited by: James Wade
History Should Never Be Forgotten...
Category
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LearningTranscript
00:02British Army sergeant Norman Midgley must have thought he had seen it all by April 1945.
00:08Even before the war started, he had seen his fair share of both the best and worst of humanity,
00:13in his vocation as a staff photographer for the Daily Express newspaper, based in Manchester, England.
00:19When the war started, the British Army therefore had a specific task for him in mind, given his experience and
00:26expertise,
00:26specifically as a member of the Army Film and Photography Unit.
00:30It was his job to record in pictures the events experienced by British and Commonwealth forces in the fight against
00:37the Axis,
00:38he and his compatriots being embedded inside frontline British combat units.
00:43It was a role no less dangerous than any other soldier on the battlefield,
00:47and in fact statistically it was even more so, with Midgley's unit alone suffering an appalling 1 in 4 casualty
00:53rate.
00:55By the time he found himself travelling in a jeep to a remote location being held by the British 11th
01:00Armoured Division in northern Germany,
01:02southwest of the town of Bergen, on April 18th 1945, much of the fighting had begun to die down,
01:09and instead he found himself with a new task, recording the evidence of Nazi crimes.
01:14In that regard, he was told he was being taken to something particularly ghastly and inhumane, the Bergen-Belsen concentration
01:22camp.
01:24Originally used to house Soviet prisoners of war following Hitler's invasion of the Soviet Union in mid-1941,
01:31the camp later expanded to house any of the so-called undesirable people in the eugenically motivated Nazi mindset.
01:39Overcrowding, lack of food and poor sanitation led to outbreaks of typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and dysentery among those imprisoned
01:47there.
01:48That was one thing, but as Midgley would soon discover, the only thing worse than death through negligence of those
01:54entrusted to hold them prisoner
01:55was the deliberate brutality and violence of their guards.
02:00Photographing the scenes of horror, he was then led to one of the Germans that had been taken prisoner by
02:04the British troops.
02:06This was Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Grämer, the former commandant of the camp.
02:12In a letter written shortly after this meeting, Midgley described the man who had overseen such organised suffering,
02:18quote,
02:19When our troops arrived at the camp, he met them resplendent in his uniform, full of arrogance.
02:24The commandant looked like a real thug.
02:27His feet were shackled to prevent his escape.
02:30He will surely be tried as a war criminal.
02:33End quote.
02:35And tried he was, for Midgley at that time could have only had a fleeting idea
02:39of the career of the man who history would remember as the Beast of Belsen.
02:44In this episode, we will shed light on the history and crimes of Kramer,
02:49and the subordinates under his command.
02:50Welcome to Wars of the World.
03:26The man who had come to be remembered as the Beast of Belsen came from a relatively unassuming background.
03:33Born on November 10th 1906 in Munich, he was the only child of Theodore and Maria Kramer,
03:39a middle class family which devoutly followed the Roman Catholic faith.
03:44When he was 9 years old, his family relocated to Augsburg where the young Josef would attend school
03:50before beginning an apprenticeship at age 14 to become an electrician, a lucrative career at the time.
03:57Yet despite this, Kramer found himself largely unemployed for much of the 1920s,
04:02save for his brief stints as an accountant and working in a department store.
04:07By 1931, Kramer found himself pulled in by the allure of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi movement,
04:13and he quickly signed up to become a member of the party.
04:16The following year, he went a step further and joined the SS,
04:20who as well as providing protection to the party leader,
04:23was soon growing in importance as the epitome of the Nazi ideology.
04:28In 1934, he was reassigned to a new but growing arm of the SS,
04:33which would be responsible for the confinement of those opposed to Hitler's rule
04:36following his appointment as German Chancellor in 1933.
04:41Once accepted into his new position, he was assigned to Dachau,
04:44a place whose name would come to represent the foundation of what history would remember
04:48as the concentration camps.
04:51Established on March 10th 1933, just five weeks after Hitler came to power,
04:56Dachau served as the prototype for the camps that were to follow,
05:00and Kramer would prove more than enthusiastic in carrying out his duties,
05:04something that impressed his senior commanders.
05:07As such, the mid-1930s would see him progress through the ranks
05:10in something of a meteoric rise to power within the service,
05:14and he soon became associated with some of the more influential members of the SS.
05:20Following the capture of Poland in 1939,
05:23Hitler ordered those Polish leaders, intellectuals,
05:25and of course, the undesirables such as Jews,
05:28to be quarantined from the rest of the population.
05:31Therefore, it was decided to establish a concentration camp to house them
05:35in the newly annexed Polish regions of Upper Silesia,
05:38and the task of locating a suitable location fell to SS officer Rudolf Hoss,
05:44who took with him an assistant, Josef Kramer.
05:47Together, the two men and their entourage scoured the region
05:50before settling on a former Polish army barracks that had been built during the time of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.
05:56Its Polish name was Oswiemczym.
06:00Its given German name was Auschwitz.
06:03Kramer, however, would find himself assigned to another significant camp as construction of Auschwitz got underway.
06:10The Natzweiler-Stutthof camp held the distinction of being the only concentration camp
06:15established within the confines of pre-war France's boundaries,
06:19and was established on May 1, 1941, near Natzweiler in the Brücher Valley.
06:24The area was ideal, being isolated from the main French population by dense forestry,
06:30and was situated near a quarry where prisoners could be forced to work.
06:34Kramer was named as Commandant in April 1941,
06:38and oversaw its operation primarily as a labor and transit camp,
06:42and initially was focused on housing members of what Hitler referred to as
06:46the Nacht und Nibel, or Night and Fog groups.
06:49Essentially, anyone who actively opposed German rule and ideology in the occupied land,
06:55or simply those who didn't fit into the ideal image of the Nazi world.
07:00Eventually, of course, that role began to expand,
07:03and soon it became policy to simply work prisoners there to death,
07:06rather than to ship them out to dedicated extermination camps.
07:11A gas chamber was established at the camp,
07:13but this was used for selective killing of those too ill or injured to continue their work,
07:18rather than the mass extermination of Jews and others.
07:22It was while Kramer was based there that anatomist August Herth approached Kramer with a proposal.
07:28Working towards proving the superiority of the pure Germanic peoples over the lesser peoples such as the Jews,
07:35Herth proposed creating a collection of 87 Jewish skulls to, in his twisted mind at least,
07:41prove the inferiority of Jews by the shape of their skulls alone.
07:46Kramer was more than happy to oblige,
07:48and 87 men and women were selected to become part of the horrific display,
07:53with a documentary film crew assembled to record the whole process.
07:57Many of the selectees were transported into the camp specifically for the cruel project.
08:02In the end, 86 were gassed under Kramer's orders,
08:06while the 87th had to be shot as he fought his guard so vigorously against being gassed that they were
08:11left with no choice.
08:19His commitment to what became known as the final solution,
08:23saw Kramer promoted to the rank of Hauptsturmfuhrer, or captain in the SS.
08:27And in May 1944, he was transferred to Auschwitz II Birkenau,
08:32the main extermination facility in the now sprawling complex of confinement and misery that he had helped to establish.
08:40Being in command of Birkenau, Kramer was said to relish in his role as Lagerfuhrer, or camp commander in charge
08:47of operations.
08:48Those operations of course being the industrial scale murder of anyone who did not fit into Nazi ideology's criteria for
08:55being truly human.
08:58Survivors and staff at the camp later testified how Kramer took an active part in the selection process of those
09:04who would be sent to work and those who would be immediately gassed.
09:07New arrivals would be forced to line up, and he would make the most rudimentary of inspections before deciding who
09:13lived and who died.
09:16Compassion was non-existent in Kramer's world, and he demanded such ruthlessness from his subordinates when dealing with people considered
09:23less than human.
09:25Dr. Franz Lukas testified that he tried to get out of assignments given to him by Kramer, by faking stomach
09:31and intestinal disorders.
09:33The rules failed to work on the camp commander, who took Lukas aside one day after he tried to get
09:38out of processing a group of Hungarian prisoners, and warned him,
09:41I know you are being investigated for favouring prisoners.
09:45I am now ordering you to go to the ramp, and if you fail to obey an order, I shall
09:50have you arrested on the spot.
09:54Discipline and disobedience from his staff and those in his custody were strictly enforced.
09:59As he would later testify himself, corporal punishment was always an option, and he had a particularly cruel way of
10:05administering it to not only add shame to the victim, but to further dissuade others.
10:10In his own twisted words, he said,
10:13I should say that I got permission to carry out corporal punishment about 35 to 40 times.
10:19The prisoner had to bend over a table, and the punishment was administered by the other prisoners.
10:26However, when dealing with people who had nothing to lose, sometimes not even Kramer's harsh discipline was enough to contain
10:32the innate wish to live,
10:34such as what happened on October 7th, 1944.
10:37Kramer again recounted, quote,
10:40There was a sort of revolt, and people tried to escape and set fire to crematoria numbers 1 and 3.
10:46At the time I was at home, about 3 kilometers away, and could not believe that it was true.
10:52I heard that all the troops available in Auschwitz number 1 had been loaded into trucks and driven to Birkenau,
10:57and that the fire brigade was also on its way.
11:00When I arrived near crematoria number 3, I saw that it was burnt out already.
11:04As far as I know, none of the prisoners succeeded in getting out.
11:08But by the time I had arrived, the ringleaders of the mutiny had been shot and were laying on the
11:13ground.
11:14End quote.
11:16During his time at the camp, he was joined by another notorious figure in the story of the concentration camps,
11:22that of Irma Greyser.
11:24Greyser was every bit as sadistic as Kramer, perhaps even more so.
11:28Her young girl-like features standing in stark contrast to the reports of her cruelty that involved the physical, psychological,
11:35and even sexual torture of some 30,000 women prisoners under her control.
11:40Like Kramer, she took an active part in the selection process of those destined for gassing.
11:46All of this from someone who was barely 20 years old in 1944, when Kramer arrived.
11:59Kramer's time at Auschwitz II Birkenau was comparatively short given his time at Natzweiler Struthof.
12:06In late November 1944, he was informed that he would be transferring to the Bergen-Belsen camp, whereupon he would
12:13replace Adolf Haas as the commandant.
12:16Belsen was a different experience than his previous commands, and in fact would not even be designated as a concentration
12:22camp by the SS Economic Administration Main Office until after he replaced Haas.
12:29Located in Lower Saxony in northern Germany, the foundations of the camp were established in the autumn of 1940, being
12:36built to serve as a holding area for the expected numbers of prisoners of war, which Hitler expected to take
12:41following the start of his invasion of the Soviet Union.
12:44It would not be until July 7th 1943 that the first transport of Jewish prisoners from Poland would arrive in
12:52the Sonderlager, or so-called Special Camp.
12:55These were joined in August 1943 by Jews from countries neutral in the war, but still found themselves within the
13:01Nazi hemisphere.
13:03Dubbed the Neutralenlager, or Neutral Camp, prisoners here came from countries such as Spain, Portugal and Turkey, and some coming
13:11from as far afield as Argentina.
13:14By October 1943, prisoners were being selected for transfer to Auschwitz, where their final fate would await them.
13:21It became so intertwined in the industrial murder machine of the Third Reich that by February 1944 the camp no
13:28longer housed non-Jewish prisoners of war, it being dedicated solely to the destruction of the Jewish people.
13:33According to American war correspondent William Fry, who entered Belsen soon after its capture and interviewed former prisoners there,
13:43At Belsen, Kramer's predecessor also of the SS, was kind and considerate. Prisoners had enough to eat and proper medical
13:51care, and were treated as human beings.
13:53The vileness began with Kramer's arrival five months ago. He instituted starvation as punishment, kept it up as a habit.
14:02He enjoyed the shuddering filthiness, with the lascivious lust for degradation and death, that Belsen became.
14:08I heard that occasionally, men starving in Belsen watched the dying with hunger, and as soon as they were dead,
14:15cut out their hearts, livers and kidneys, and devoured them to sustain their own vanishing lives.
14:21One man seized in cannibalism by the SS was forced to kneel publicly, holding in his teeth the ear of
14:27a corpse the entire day."
14:31Just how kind and considerate Haas had been before Kramer's arrival is open to interpretation.
14:37He simply may not have had the evil glee that Kramer had in his work.
14:41Figures on deaths before and after Kramer assumed command of the camp on December 2nd 1944,
14:47certainly imply that despite not having any gas chambers to use, he was able to bring death and misery upon
14:52the camp's population regardless,
14:54which was in the process of swelling due to an influx of prisoners from other camps, which were being closed
14:59down as the war drew ever closer to Germany.
15:02In the first month of his tenure, 360 people died at Belsen.
15:07That number almost quadrupled in the following month, and it only rose in the waning months of the war.
15:13Perhaps anticipating that he would be answering for his crimes, on March 1st 1945, he filed a report asking for
15:20help and resources,
15:21stating that of the 42,000 inmates in his camp, 250 to 300 of them died each day from typhus,
15:28and he warned that with the ever increasing numbers being transferred to his custody, that the toll would only rise.
15:34Some have suspected that this report was him laying the groundwork for his defense at his inevitable trial after the
15:40war ended,
15:41hoping to explain away the deaths as those from disease.
15:44While it's true that disease did run rampant in the camp, like it did in all concentration camps,
15:49his figures ignore the numbers who died from his program of starvation and violence.
15:54That month alone when he filed his morbid report, over 18,000 people had died in Belsen.
16:01Also relocating to Belsen that month was Irma Grese.
16:05It felt that it was not safe for a female Nazi to remain at Auschwitz as the Soviets closed in.
16:12Grese's cruelty towards inmates reportedly, if it can be believed, became even worse in the environment at Belsen,
16:18that Krama had created.
16:20There she was known to make prisoners stand or kneel in snow, ice and rain for hours at a time,
16:27sometimes having to carry heavy rocks above their heads as they did so.
16:31If someone found themselves unable to carry out this task,
16:34she would beat the prisoner with a rubber truncheon until they were unconscious.
16:38In one of her most notorious incidents, she set a trap for the starving prisoners by leaving some potato peelings
16:44laying around.
16:45Two sisters consumed by an insatiable hunger tried to eat them, only to find Grese appearing and punishing them by
16:52knocking their heads violently together.
16:54What makes this incident so especially cruel is that it took place just hours before the British troops arrived.
17:01By his own admission, Krama spent the end of March destroying the meticulous records that had been kept at the
17:07camp,
17:08after he learned that given the current military situation and the size of the population he was now responsible for
17:13at Bergen-Belsen,
17:14they could not possibly be evacuated as the front line neared.
17:18Given what history knows about them, one can only wonder what additional horrors those documents contained.
17:30On April 12, 1945, with the British 11th Armored Division closing in,
17:36two German army emissaries were dispatched under a flag of truce to negotiate with British forces.
17:42They told the British that the camp was now under the command of the Wehrmacht and not the SS,
17:47and that their main responsibility was to contain an outbreak of typhus that was savaging the camp's population.
17:54During these negotiations, the German army emissaries explained that they would be willing to apprehend the SS administrative staff
18:00and hand them over, something one British officer present at the negotiations noted that they seemed almost eager to do.
18:08With permission from the head of the SS, Heinrich Himmler, Kramer prepared to surrender his camp.
18:12British Army Captain Dick Williams was invited to survey the facility and meet Kramer before the bulk of the 11th
18:19Armored moved in.
18:21When he returned, the visibly shaken officer demanded that an immediate effort be made to deliver as much food and
18:27medical assistance as possible as it was going to be needed.
18:31The 11th Armored entered on the 15th, and the scale of the horrors that went on there could start to
18:36be catalogued.
18:37A British Army officer later testified that one of the women's huts had space for 83 soldiers to live in,
18:43given British Army standards of the day.
18:46And yet he and his men removed 1,426 women from the very same space, the dead at times being
18:53indistinguishable from the living.
18:55With that in mind, it becomes understandable when on one occasion, British troops were shocked and horrified to find a
19:02young girl who they believed to be dead begin to make very small movements after having been placed amongst a
19:08group of bodies earmarked for cremation.
19:10She had so wasted away by that time that she was literally on the edge of life and death.
19:15This also left them wondering the awful question if any of those already cremated were still alive if only just.
19:23In one part of the camp, as many as 10,000 people were crammed into a space without a single
19:28working toilet.
19:30In one final cruel twist of the tale of the man who had become known as the Beast of Belsen,
19:36deaths continued for weeks after the liberation, despite the best efforts of their liberators.
19:40Between the British entering the camp and the end of June 1945, as many as 14,000 former inmates perished,
19:48with them simply being beyond the help of anyone.
19:51In order to help the effort of burying the bodies, the former guards who were now themselves prisoners of the
19:57Allies were put to work as William Fry explained, quote,
20:28End quote.
20:31Kramer and 44 others, including Irma Grise, were quickly put on trial, charged under British military legal practices.
20:40The trial was held at Lundberg, some 40 miles from the camp, and took place between September 17th and November
20:4617th.
20:48The trial was not without its controversy, since the British officers presiding over the trial broke with convention by allowing
20:55sworn avidats to be read out in court as evidence, instead of witnesses taking the stand to testify.
21:01This being controversial since the witnesses could not be cross-examined by the defense.
21:06The British courts deemed this necessary, as many of those liberated from the camp on April 15th were no longer
21:12in Germany, or in many cases had since succumbed to their mistreatment.
21:16Kramer was found guilty, and there could only be one sentence for such heinous crimes.
21:22On December 11th, 1945, an aircraft landed at Bookerburg from Britain with a special passenger on board, one Albert Pierpoint,
21:31who history now remembers as Britain's last hangman.
21:35Assisted by Regimental Sergeant Major Richard O'Neill, he set about making the preparations for Kramer's execution, building a gallows
21:43at Hamlin Prison.
21:45On December 13th, a noose on the end of a length of rope, tailored to Pierpoint's exact specifications for Kramer's
21:51size and weight, was placed around his neck.
21:53As Pierpoint pulled the lever, the trap door beneath Kramer gave way, the noose tightened, and the beast of Belson
22:00was no more.
22:02He was one of the 13 executed by Pierpoint that day.
22:06.
22:06.
22:06.
22:06.
22:06.
22:06.
22:07.
22:07.
22:07You
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