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The British Doctor Who Fought Typhus and Starvation at Bergen-Belsen

(Times of Israel) Matt Lebovic - Within days of becoming the first Allied Medical Officer to enter the German "horror camp" of Bergen-Belsen, Brigadier H.L. Glyn Hughes set about creating the largest hospital in Europe. In the course of fighting typhus and starvation at Bergen-Belsen, the British officer began using an unusual set of parameters in making his plans: death rates, alongside numbers of mass graves and typhus-infected barracks. In her new book, All the Horrors of War: A Jewish Girl, a British Doctor, and the Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, author Bernice Lerner juxtaposes the feats orchestrated by Hughes with the plight of her own mother, one of the inmates liberated by the officer. When Hughes arrived with the British army, he was forced to make immediate decisions about triage. In addition to the corpses stacked everywhere, there were 60,000 survivors who needed urgent medical attention. "His highly focused plan involved placing inmates into one of three categories," wrote Lerner. "Those likely to survive, those likely to die, and those for whom immediate care would mean the difference between life and death." Assisted by army staff and 97 British medical students, Hughes coped with hundreds of daily fatalities well past the camp's April 15 liberation. The army took control of a hospital near the camp and emptied its German patients to make room for camp victims. Hughes also authorized "tours" of Bergen-Belsen for German leaders from the region, hundreds of whom were forced to witness what had been done in their name. "Belsen was unique in its vile treatment of human beings," said Hughes after the war. "Nothing like it had happened before in the history of mankind. The victims of this infamous behavior have been reduced to a condition of subhuman existence, and there we were, a mere handful of war-weary men trying to save those who could still be saved and to allay the sea of suffering and the depths of agony."
2020-04-17 00:00:00
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