By Elena Kingsbury, FSWC Senior Educator
Curriculum Connection:
Strand B3.5 Canadian government response to the Holocaust, acts of hate and human rights violations describe the responses of the Canadian government to human rights violations during the Holocaust (e.g., severe restrictions on immigration and the policy of “none is too many”; the turning away of the MS St. Louis; Canada’s policy to vastly restrict the number of Jewish refugees admitted from Europe, as shown by the response to the Evian Conference [1938]) and the impact that global changes in understanding and legislation around human rights since World War II have had on the development of Canada’s responses to acts of hate and human rights violations.
Canada’s Armed Forces and the Liberation of Nazi Camps
The persecution of Europe’s Jewish communities was not the main reason for Canada’s entry into the Second World War; nonetheless, the genocidal crimes of the Nazi regime were impossible for soldiers to ignore when they entered the gates of camps including Westerbork in the Netherlands and Bergen Belsen in Germany. Young men, many barely out of their teens, far removed from home and the familiar, were among the first people to discover the depravity and scale of the genocide against Jews in Europe. Their encounters at the camps were “haunting, transformative experiences that forever changed their lives.”
Canadian forces arrived at Bergen-Belsen on April 15, 1945, just days after the liberation of Westerbork, joining the British who had secured the peaceful surrender of the camp days before. Canadians arrived to provide support, to bear witness, and to document the crimes of Nazi Germany. What they ultimately witnessed there was unimaginable: arriving amidst a terrible typhus epidemic, Canadians saw 13,000 emaciated corpses lying scattered throughout the camp, about 60,000 living inmates, starving, sick and mostly Jewish. About 500 were children. Teenage Anne Frank had died there of typhus just weeks before the camp was liberated. Combat pilot Brian MacConnell described the experience of witnessing these horrors, stating “I’m pretty sure we were taken there to tell people what we had seen. We were in complete shock. I couldn’t believe a civilized country like Germany could do such a thing.”
By all accounts, Canadian forces were overwhelmed by what they came upon and ill-prepared for the work at hand, left without adequate supplies, equipment, and medicine. Even so, they provided important relief in multiple ways. One Jewish Canadian soldier, Sol Goldberg, became frustrated with the pace of official relief efforts and initiated some of his own, including collecting blankets, clothing, boots and food from fellow enlisted men. He allegedly even cut a hole in the camp’s fences and smuggled supplies directly to survivors, who trusted him because he spoke fluent Yiddish. Jack Markovitch, a Jewish soldier from Montreal, participated in the arrest of the camp commandant, Josef Kramer, who was later sentenced to death.
Despite the best efforts of Canadian and other Allied soldiers, medical professionals and volunteers, over the next month roughly 14,000 more inmates died tragically, succumbing to typhus, cholera, dysentery and general starvation. The trauma of witnessing the terrible consequences of Nazi policies forever changed Canadian soldiers, but this trauma was not pointless; aside from the immediate relief they provided, their first-hand accounts are forever an invaluable part of the historical record. The voices of witnesses became instrumental in the fight against Holocaust denial and distortion in the ensuing decades.
Further Reading:
Kingdom of Night: Witnesses to the Holocaust (2021) by Mark Celinscak
https://legionmagazine.com/liberating-the-death-camps/
https://ellinbessner.com/2023/02/how-canadian-soldiers-liberated-the-nazi-death-camps-in-ww2/
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