Britain’s Witnesses to Buchenwald
In April 1945 ten British politicians flew to Germany tasked with investigating the ‘truth’ about Buchenwald concentration camp.
The Nazi camps at Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsen were liberated on 11 and 15 April 1945 respectively. In the week that followed, graphic photographs and descriptions of the horrors found by Allied troops so dominated British newspapers that, as the Yorkshire Post noted, the public had begun to show signs of becoming ‘numbed’ to the stories. This was clear in the diaries and interviews collected by the Mass-Observation project, as people wrote of becoming ‘hardened’ to the pictures, or of turning away from the ‘horrible things’ shown. As the public continued to come to terms with the reality of the camps, it was decided that a British parliamentary delegation would be sent to Buchenwald. Tasked by prime minister Winston Churchill (then just weeks away from a landslide defeat in the July general election) ‘to tell the world the truth’ about the camps, the delegation’s immediate impact was less due to the horrors it reported and more due to the personal effect the visit had on its various members.
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