PRESS RELEASE: Gloucester History Festival speaker Nat Saye says seeing the liberation of Belsen means no Holocaust denial is ever credible
95 year old Nat Fiennes, Lord Saye & Sele, told a Gloucester History Festival audience of his wartime experience as one of the first British army officers to see the Nazi concentration camp of Belsen after its liberation by the British in April 1945.
The former Rifle Brigade adjutant recounted: “We went into lots of huts and camps. The smell was appalling, and there were rows and rows of people inside. You couldn’t tell whether they were dead or alive: they might have been either. And then outside we saw a tractor and trailer with heaps of bodies on it, and a German sitting on top of the bodies smoking a cigarette. Close by there was an enormous pit and in it perhaps 500 bodies, but it may have been a thousand, I don’t know. It was a very large number of bodies.”
When the British Army arrived at Belsen, prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 a day as a result of starvation and a typhus outbreak. The soldiers discovered 10,000 unburied bodies and a further 13,000 people died even after help had arrived when the camp was liberated.
Lord Saye went on to add, “If you ever come across anyone who denies the Holocaust, send them my way because I know: I saw Belsen”.
History Committee Chair and Gloucester MP Richard Graham commented, “When I was young the WW1 survivors never talked about their experiences – it was all too ghastly for them – and we were none the wiser. Lord Saye’s generation from World War 2 prefer not to talk about some things too – of his battalion of 800, over 500 were killed or wounded – but recently some of the remaining survivors, including Nat Saye, have done so. That first-hand experience of Belsen makes the point so vividly for those studying World War 2 today.
That is exactly what the Gloucester History Festival can do – as it did too with the Battle of the Imjin River – bring the events of the past alive vividly, with powerful lessons for us all.”