Luneburg, September 20

This has been a terrible day at the Belsen trial. First this morning all the courtroom, court, prisoners, press, and German spectators saw the films taken in camp by the British Army Film Photographic Unit just after British troops had liberated it. Then followed the evidence by the only Briton known to survive the camp—a Jersey schoolmaster named Harold Osmand le Drieullenac of St. Helier.

British troops enter Belsen, 1945.

Mr. Le Drieullenac is a dark-haired, youngish man, limping on a heavy stick. He was wearing a dark-grey suit and looked like a typical British civilian in the purely military atmosphere of a court martial. He told the court that with most of his family he was arrested at St. Helier on the day before D-Day. For 18 months he had concealed a Russian officer prisoner and in addition had a hidden radio. He was first sent to Wilhelmshaven, where he was made a welder in the naval arsenal, and then went to Belsen with the rest of his arbeitskommando. From the evidence in this trial and from other sources it appears that as the Allied armies advanced into Germany the Germans shipped off all the foreign workers to the nearest concentration camp.

On arrival at Belsen with his kommondo on the night of what he believes was April 5, he was placed in a hut which was in a state of filth and overcrowding which nobody in the outside world ever dreamed could exist before Belsen was discovered. The next morning, after a roll-call lasting from 3.30 to 9, he inspected the next hut, a long, low building. Looking through a hole where a window had been, he saw one or two bodies lying about in the water on the floor of what had been the wash-place. Looking through other windows he saw piles of bodies systematically stacked, each one’s head resting on the chest of the man or woman below. The whole building was full of corpses.

A PUZZLED AIR



This and the rest of his evidence Mr. Le Drieullenac gave in a matter of fact way. This was the first time Kramer and his associates had faced one of the survivors of their camp, but for the first hour or so the Jersey man did not even look at them. Then, during the intervals for the translation of his evidence into German and Polish, he began looking at them with what seemed to be a puzzled air as if trying to find a link between his dreadful experience and the three rows of men and women in the dock and as if trying to realise that these were the people who had been the rulers of the camp where he had seen his best friend, a French colonel, dragged off to the burial pit to be thrown in while still alive.

When British tanks reached the camp Mr. Le Drieullenac was having his first meal for five days – grass. In the whole ten days there he had about one pint of soup in a mug which he took from a pile of effects of the dead. There was no water to wash the mug, but he did get one drink by climbing over the dead bodies in the washroom. The grass meal was got when the Germans on the last day moved him with some comrades to better quarters, this apparently being done to make a more favourable impression on the British troops. This motive was also, it would seem, behind the efforts which the Germans forced the prisoners to make to get rid of the bodies in the course of which Mr. Le Drieullenac said, the number of dead buried ran into five figures.

From the evidence it became clear how this was done. After a sleepless night – for sleep in the huts was impossible – the men were driven to a hut where the dead were collected. They were instructed by what the witness called the “language of blows, which was universal.” Their duty was to take strips of blankets, tie them to a corpse, and, four men to a corpse, drag it across the main road of the camp along dusty paths to the burial pit. In the midst of this work, which lasted three days without sleep, food, or water till the British arrived, one Hungarian guard at the exit from the hut containing the bodies began shooting all prisoners if they did not come out dragging a body at the double. During the last three days the Hungarian guards were almost continuously shooting at prisoners, sometimes single shots, sometimes fusillades.

CUT PIECE OFF CORPSE



Mr. Le Drieullenac said that as he helped to drag the bodies he noticed many had wounds at the top of the thigh. “First I thought they were gunshot wounds,” he told. the court to-day. “Then I saw that they could not be and a friend told me that men were cutting bits out of the bodies to eat them. When I went into the but to another body I saw a man take a knife and, looking to see if he was unobserved, cut a piece of flesh from the body and put it in his mouth. You can imagine the condition to which the men had been reduced to run the risk of eating flesh taken from a body turned black.”

At the end of the evidence Mr. Le Drieiglenac was asked if he could identify anyone in the dock as having been guilty of cruelty to and ill-treatment of the prisoners. There was a hush, then a feeling of anticlimax as he said he could not. It became clear from his evidence that, so far as he was concerned, apart from the Hungarian guards the people most responsible for individual atrocities were those prisoners, mostly criminals, given positions of authority by the camp commandant. Asked by the court how Belsen compared with other camps he had been in, witness said that the others (Neuhamme and Arbeitskommando of Wilhelmshaven) were worse as far as sadism was concerned, but that on the whole Belsen was much the worst.

All this and much more Mr. Le Drieullenac told the court. The effect on his hearers was to blanket to a great extent the impression they had received from the film which had shown the prisoners in the dock carting dead bodies like Smithfield porters carrying sides of mutton – bodies which could not have been heavier – to the burial pit, and then, with one man taking the legs and others the hands, throwing them into the pit. S.S. women also were engaged in this work, but probably the most horrible shot of all showed a bulldozer pushing piles of bodies towards the pit, the driver hanging on to the wheel with one hand and holding a handkerchief to his nose with the other.

When the lights went up after showing the film, one German in the dock could be seen obviously pointing out with satisfaction to his comrades that he had just seen himself on the film. For the rest the accused took it very quietly, though two or three women were obviously not far from tears.