Our Dad’s Visit to the Ruins of Belsen Concentration Camp

I’m telling this story to make it even clearer that Mike isn’t Holocaust denier, and that he and I were brought up knowing about the atrocity by parents, who hated and despise the Nazis and their crimes like every other decent person.

Our father did his national service in Bielefeld in Germany. It was a town then on the borders of the former West Germany. While he was there, he visited the remains of Belsen concentration camp, and took pictures. I can remember him showing them to Mike and myself when were both in junior school. This was way back in the 1970s, when war comics were in vogue – not just Battle, but also Warlord, the war stories in Action, like ‘Hellmann of Hammer Force’, and the DC Thompson war comics in Commando Picture Library. This was also the decade when there were an increasing number of films about the Second World War. Mike and I read the war comics, and this led us at the time to ask questions about the Second World War. It might have been in response to one of these that Dad got out his photo album to show us his photos of the ruins of the camp. This worried Mum. She was afraid that the photos, and the story behind them, would be too upsetting for us and give us nightmares. It didn’t. From what I can remember, the photos mostly showed grassed over pits. These, our father told us, were where the Nazi burned and buried the bodies of those they’d murdered. Talking to him last night, he said that from one pit they pulled 12,000 human remains. I’d have to look up how many were killed in toto at the wretched place, but the simple figure of 12,000 for that just one pit is shocking. He’s also said several times that no birds sang there. I’ve heard that about the other concentration camps as well. It’s as if the monstrous evil the Nazis committed infected the very land itself, desecrating it of all life.

A few decades later, Mike himself visited one of the other Nazi concentration camps – Sachsenhausen. I think this was when he was at college, studying modern European literature. Part of the course included a trip to West Berlin, and I think it was while he was there that he visited the remains of that particularly abomination.

The real Nazis make disgusting jokes about the Holocaust, when they’re not trying to convince the world that it didn’t happen, or was a lot smaller than reputable historians have shown. I don’t think they tend to visit them, though. Mike is very, very definitely not a Holocaust denier, nor anti-Semite, and those, who are smearing him are vile, disgusting political manipulators committing libel.

Tags: 'Battle', 'Commando Picture Library', 'Warlord', Belsen, College, Concentration Camps, DC Thompson, Holocaust, Holocaust Denial, Libel, National Service, Sachsenhausen, Vox Political, West Berlin, World War II