German medical officers told me that it had been increasingly difficult to transport food to the camp for some months. Anything that moved on the autobahns was likely to be bombed. [...] I was surprised to find records, going back for two or three years, of large quantities of food cooked daily for distribution. At that time I became convinced, contrary to popular opinion, that there had never been a policy of deliberate starvation. [...] The major reasons for the state at Belsen were disease, gross overcrowding by central authority, lack of law and order in the huts, and inadequate supplies of food, water and drugs.Så här skrev en korrespondent för tidningen London Illustrated News i samband med britternas intåg:
This huge camp, which had contained some 60,000 civilians, was little more than a mass of dead and dying, mainly from starvation, typhus, and typhoid. The camp was declared a neutral area before we arrived and the Allied military authorities stood by to reach it at the earliest possible moment, for it was known that the living had been without food or water for over six days.År 1944 hade lägret omklassificerats till ett "återhämtningsläger", och förhållandena var förhållandevis acceptabla. Faktum är att Bergen-Belsen kategoriserades av tyskarna som ett "improduktivt" läger, och som ett resultat av detta skickades en stor mängd fångar från andra läger som inte längre hade några ekonomiska syften (inklusive, anmärkningsvärt nog, enorma mängder fångar från "dödslägret" Auschwitz-Birkenau, som enligt legenden hade kunnat gasa onödiga fångar, bland dem Anne Frank, som deporterades till Bergen-Belsen från Auschwitz och dog i tyfus).
Daily life in the "Detention Camp" was harsh, but tolerable. The average daily ration consisted of coffee in the morning, 1.5 litres of soup at noon and, if available, 200-300 grammes of bread in the afternoon. Sometimes there would be a little jam or butter, or a small slice of sausage or cheese.Med andra ord var sjukdoms- och matsituationen ett resultat av den allmänna kollapsen av tysk infrastruktur.
During the war, the Allies dropped 1.3 million tons of bombs on Germany, destroying over 40 percent of the urban area of the seventy largest cities and killing 305,000 civilians. At the same time, the Allies had rendered untenable all of Germany's military strategies, not only the original offensive program for dominating Europe but also the later defensive strategies for preserving the territorial integrity of Germany against the Allied counteroffensives. Thus, both punishment- and denial-based theories would have predicted success.Han fortsätter:
The initial plans followed the 1930's "industrial web" theory, which predicted that small amounts of destruction, if concentrated on weak nodes critical to the system as a whole, would bring the whole economic house of cards down Economic collapse, in tum, would render the enemy incapable of sustaining military operations and would also incite the civilian population to pressure the government to stop the war. [...]Men tydligen fortsatte allt som vanligt fram till april 1945.
To cause a general collapse of the economy by hitting just a few targets, the key was to destroy targets that affected both the war effort and civilian welfare. The target priorities recommended in AWPD-1 were the German air force (aircraft factories, aluminum and magnesium plants), followed by the electric power grid, the transportation network (rail, inland waterways, and highways), and the petroleum industry.
The German air force was seen not as a final objective but as a preliminary requirement to clear the way for attacks on the decisive targets. Of these, electric power had top priority because it was "vital to the German war effort, and ... highly important to civil life." Loss of electricity-generating capability would affect weapons manufacturing, cold storage of food, manufacture of warm clothing, and transportation within cities. National transportation, especially of primary resources, came next: "In addition to the effect upon war industry, crippling the German transportation system would bring severe suffering to the German people by denying them the necessary coal for heating. The winters in Germany are cold and clothing is becoming scarce. Breakdown of the transportation system would interfere
with the orderly distribution of foodstuffs and common utilities." In short, the idea was to cause a shortage of key components, which would halt nearly all of Germany's production of manufactured goods, military as well
as civilian.
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Flashback finansieras genom donationer från våra medlemmar och besökare. Det är med hjälp av dig vi kan fortsätta erbjuda en fri samhällsdebatt. Tack för ditt stöd!
Swish: 123 536 99 96 Bankgiro: 211-4106