The Prisoners of Breendonk: Personal Histories from a World War II Concentration Camp by Deem James M

Author:Deem, James M.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2015-08-03T23:00:00+00:00

This typical flyer printed by the Independence Front encouraged Belgians to help Hitler send his troops over the cliff and into the precipice.

▪ ▪ ▪

By eight o’clock on the morning of September 1, the forty postal workers had been assembled at the SIPO-SD office in Brussels to confirm their identities. By nine, the men had been taken to Breendonk. By ten, they were at work outside. When it was lunchtime, they were sent to their barrack for soup. Désiré Piens looked into the large container of foul-smelling liquid and observed some wilted cabbage leaves floating on top, and a few potatoes. Almost none of the postmen could eat it even though they hadn’t had any food all day.

It would not be long, Piens admitted later, before they would give anything for an extra spoonful of the same soup—or a few potato peels rescued from the garbage. Only a week after they arrived at Breendonk, food packages were prohibited once again, and signs of starvation edema—the illness that had afflicted many prisoners during the summer of 1941—began to reappear.

In October, forty-four cases of starvation edema were diagnosed; in November, there were eighty-six. This sudden surge in extreme malnutrition caused the Militärverwaltung to request an increased bread ration. Even the new camp physician, Dr. Heinz Pohl, stated that unless rations were augmented, there would be more deaths. But the bread ration was not increased, and 101 out of the 240 prisoners at the camp were diagnosed with the life-threatening condition at the beginning of December 1942.

Piens saw what happened to a healthy group of some ninety men who were transferred to Breendonk from another prison in northern France. These prisoners from Douai had been well fed at their former prison; they had also been able to supplement their diet with food parcels from their families. Piens and the other prisoners at Breendonk marveled at their robust physical condition: the Douai prisoners were not especially tall, but they were solidly built and probably weighed an average of about 200 pounds, according to Piens’s estimate. The Breendonk Arbeitsführers were ecstatic when they saw these men, because they could assign them the hardest jobs at the work site and know that they would perform well.

Like every other prisoner, however, the Douai prisoners were fed the Breendonk diet. Fifteen days later, they had each lost substantial weight, which robbed them of their strength. As Piens explained after the war, eventually “the lack of food takes its toll: your strength fades, your activity suffers, and as your work capacity declines every day, you increasingly expose yourself to suffer abuse from your torturers who claimed that the inmates are fed too well.”

And there were new, very eager torturers at Breendonk: the Flemish SS and a new Zugführer.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.