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The Lipstick Miracle of Bergen-Belsen
The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp was not an extermination center, there were no gas chambers, no ovens, and the camp had originally been designated for prisoners of war. That all changed in April of 1943 when the SS took over and repurposed the facility to house Jewish prisoners with foreign passports, with the hope that they could be exchanged for German prisoners or other incentives. That effort never came to fruition, as nobody would seriously negotiate with the Nazis.
The camp gradually came to house not only Jews but other “undesirable” marginalized groups such as homosexuals, the mentally ill, some Balkan ethnic groups, and the chronically homeless. The homeless were made up of a diverse group of individuals classified as “Roma or Sinti”, who had been nomadic people in Europe commonly referred to as “gypsies”, along with the “asozial” or “arbeit-scheu,” (anti-social or work-shy) these were generally people who, for whatever reason, the Nazis just could not get any work out of them. They were likely comprised mostly of the mentally ill or deficient along with the disabled.
In late 1944, the camp began to get an influx of prisoners from other camps to the east that were being over-run by the Russian advance. two of these prisoners were diarist Anne Franke and her sister Margot, who perished in Bergen-Belsen sometime in late February or early March 1945.
Along with this influx of prisoners displaced from other camps, a new commandant named Josef Kramer, AKA “The Beast of Belsen” arrived. Kramer had already carried out many gassings and executions in other camps and he thrived on cruelty.
There would never be a day of decent treatment again. It can truthfully be said that the worst of the horrors began when Kramer arrived. His solution to dysentery and typhus in the camp was to simply stop feeding the prisoners. Death cured everything! Sometime in 1944, the small crematorium stopped working, and the bodies just began piling about the camp.
Josef Kramer was an arrogant, unapologetic man who stayed there in camp to greet the British Army’s 11th Armored Division. It was a cool spring day…
