Bergen-Belsen Archives - Richard Dimbleby: Broadcaster

Introduction

In many fields Richard Dimbleby was our first as well as our foremost broadcaster. He was the first BBC news observer, the first man to take a microphone to a civil war, the first to report a Royal Tour by radio, the first BBC war correspondent, the first witness to reveal the horrors of Belsen concentration camp. He was one of the first from the West, and certainly the first war correspondent, to enter defeated Berlin.

He was the commentator for the first time television cameras were allowed at a Coronation, and at a State Opening of Parliament. He was the anchorman for our first weekly television current affairs programme.

He was there on each occasion when television pushed forward its physical frontiers: the first live relay across the Channel in 1950; through the Iron Curtain in 1961; over the Atlantic via Telstar in 1962; and round the world from Japan in 1964.

He held first place in persuading viewers to give, and give quickly, to relieve some natural disaster (his two appeals for the victims of earthquakes in Persia and Yugoslavia brought in over £800,000).

He was first in stamina in General Election Results programmes and perhaps his ‘finest hour’ was his description of the funeral of the man whose phrase that was.

But for us at the BBC he was above all a patient, gentle, courteous, confident, compassionate, loyal, and brave friend.

Richard was a great broadcaster; but great broadcasts are ephemeral. They are enjoyed and, sooner or later, forgotten. This book is offered to recall some of the thousands of broadcasts he made for the BBC and to show what it was like to work in broadcasting with him.

Four men stand beside a television camera — The Director-General of the BBC and the Lord Mayor of London, Sir Bernard Waley-Cohen, in the Panorama Studio

Outrage

I have always had a feeling that the year 1945 was a turning point in Richard’s life. It was the year in which he saw Belsen, and, as for so many of us, the world could never be quite the same after that outrage to human decency. And Richard was with the first party to go in.

It was a strange and frightening spring for the BBC war correspondents. We had covered the crossing of the Rhine, the last of the big battle set-pieces of the war, and the last occasion when we had to carry the microphone into the front line. I remember trying to do a commentary in the leading Buffalo assault craft as we plunged across the river at night, while next morning Richard was with the gliders that came through a furious storm of flak to make the biggest airborne landing ever staged by the allies. We met on the ground not long afterwards and I remember Richard saying to me, ‘I don’t think I want to see much more of war. I’ve had five years of reporting it and that’s enough for any man.’ I admitted that I had also lost my keenness for front line reporting – in 1945 the end seemed in sight and no one wants to take risks in the last minutes of a battle.

Besides, we were now driving fast through Northern Germany and we were beginning to uncover some of the grim secrets that the Nazis had been guarding for so long – party headquarters with secret documents of the treatment of political opponents, propaganda centres full of the mad fantasies of the Third Reich, forced labour camps with starving Russian prisoners-of-war. But so far we had not found traces of the most notorious of the Nazi crimes against humanity, the concentration camps, the mysterious places to which men and women were spirited away, where they were beaten, tortured, killed for the sole crime of being Jews, Poles, Gypsies, or for not believing in the mad vision of Adolf Hitler. We wondered if the stories about them had been exaggerated. After all, released prisoners tend to play for sympathy and surely not even the Nazis could descend to the depths these stories indicated.

Then, on an April morning which had a deceptive promise of warmth in the air, a rumour reached the press centre; our advancing troops had heard that ahead of them there was a camp at which typhus had broken out and they were pushing out a flying column, equipped with medical supplies, to contact the prisoners. Richard always had the good newsman’s flair for sensing a story. I admit I thought the camp was going to be a normal prisoner-of-war one, and for the last few weeks we’d liberated scores of them. ‘Nothing new here,’ I said to Richard, ‘I’ll come up later.’

When next I met Richard he was a changed man. I spotted his jeep coming down through a narrow road amongst the gloomy pine woods that dot the level North German plain. There was rain in the air and the whole atmosphere of the place seemed dank, depressing. Richard got out and said to me at once, ‘It’s horrible; human beings have no right to do this to each other. You must go and see it, but you’ll never wash the smell of it off your hands, never get the filth of it out of your mind. I’ve just made a decision. … I must tell the exact truth, every detail of it, even if people don’t believe me, even if they feel these things should not be told. This is an outrage … an outrage.’

I had never seen Richard so moved. Until then I had always regarded Richard as a man who would never let his feelings show through his utterly professional surface efficiency. But here was a new Dimbleby, a fundamentally decent man who had seen something really evil, and hated it with all his strength. Did the memory of what he saw at Belsen lie at the back of his mind and give his commentaries on great occasions, his appeals on radio and television, a feeling for the suffering and anxieties of others which was instantly perceived by the viewer? I think it did.

I went on up that dismal road and turned down the sandy track through the pine woods that led to the gates of Belsen. What we saw and felt then is best expressed in the words of the most moving despatch Richard Dimbleby ever broadcast for the BBC:

The Cesspit Beneath

19 April 1943. I picked my way over corpse after corpse in the gloom, until I heard one voice raised above the gentle undulating moaning. I found a girl, she was a living skeleton, impossible to gauge her age for she had practically no hair left, and her face was only a yellow parchment sheet with two holes in it for eyes. She was stretching out her stick of an arm and gasping something, it was ‘English, English, medicine, medicine’, and she was trying to cry but she hadn’t enough strength. And beyond her down the passage and in the hut there were the convulsive movements of dying people too weak to raise themselves from the floor.

In the shade of some trees lay a great collection of bodies. I walked about them trying to count, there were perhaps 150 of them flung down on each other, all naked, all so thin that their yellow skin glistened like stretched rubber on their bones. Some of the poor starved creatures whose bodies were there looked so utterly unreal and inhuman that I could have imagined that they had never lived at all. They were like polished skeletons, the skeletons that medical students like to play practical jokes with.

At one end of the pile a cluster of men and women were gathered round a fire; they were using rags and old shoes taken from the bodies to keep it alight, and they were heating soup over it. And close by was the enclosure where 500 children between the ages of five and twelve had been kept. They were not so hungry as the rest, for the women had sacrificed themselves to keep them alive. Babies were born at Belsen, some of them shrunken, wizened little things that could not live, because their mothers could not feed them.

An emaciated man sit on the ground outside, holding thin clothing

One woman, distraught to the point of madness, flung herself at a British soldier who was on guard at the camp on the night that it was reached by the 11th Armoured Division; she begged him to give her some milk for the tiny baby she held in her arms. She laid the mite on the ground and threw herself at the sentry’s feet and kissed his boots. And when, in his distress, he asked her to get up, she put the baby in his arms and ran off crying that she would find milk for it because there was no milk in her breast. And when the soldier opened the bundle of rags to look at the child, he found that it had been dead for days.

There was no privacy of any kind. Women stood naked at the side of the track, washing in cupfuls of water taken from British Army trucks. Others squatted while they searched themselves for lice, and examined each other’s hair. Sufferers from dysentery leaned against the huts, straining helplessly, and all around and about them was this awful drifting tide of exhausted people, neither caring nor watching. Just a few held out their withered hands to us as we passed by, and blessed the doctor, whom they knew had become the camp commander in place of the brutal Kramer.

I have never seen British soldiers so moved to cold fury as the men who opened the Belsen camp this week, and those of the police and the R.A.M.C. who are now on duty there, trying to save the prisoners who are not too far gone in starvation.

The World Goes By

Dimbleby broadcast again about Belsen a month later in ‘The World Goes By’:

May 1945. To give any adequate and factual account of the task that faces our doctors and nurses when a German Concentration Camp is delivered into their hands, one must try for a moment to set aside the undying memories that will always haunt those of us who entered the Camps in the first hours of their liberation. But, in order that what I have to say may be properly said, against the right background, let me simply remind you that the doctors, the tough, experienced army doctors who arrived early at the Belsen Camp, were nauseated, literally horrified at what they found. It was not only the filth, the stench and the decay. What really shocked the doctors and the officers and men of the army, too, was to see, for the first time in their lives, human beings who had been deliberately degraded to the level of animals. In Belsen there were peasants, factory workers, and musicians, artists, and the whole range of professional people, who fought for dirty scraps of food and, in the last stages of typhus, dragged themselves towards the heaps of bodies to lie there and die. People who had forgotten the simple customs and conventions of everyday life and were now lost in a terrible apathy brought about by unbearable misery, starvation, and the certainty of agonising death.

Again he vividly described the misery of the scene still haunting him, and ended:

When I began this talk, I was going to try and divorce sentiment and practical measure of relief. But, of course, you can’t. From what I saw at Belsen, I know that the two go hand in hand. With water and food, there must be the grain of hope, there must be a smile and a wave – things unknown for five years at Belsen. You must spread the news that help and love are coming, and as the word goes round, you will see tired heads lifting and withered hands twitching in salute, and people weakly crying with joy. Then you know, as the 2nd Army brigadier said, ‘that the spark of life is returning’.

There is one other thing you must do – something without which all the measures of relief and succour would be but temporary remedies – and that is to vow with all your heart that such horrible things shall never happen again.

Return to Belsen 1959

Dimbleby’s subsequent respect for the stability of established procedures, the security of an evolving history, and the consolation of organised religion derives from Belsen. His own eyes had witnessed what happens when human order disintegrates and man reverts to animal. He was to revisit Belsen twice:

In the summer of 1959 we were filming in Germany for the series ‘After the Battle’, in which six war correspondents returned to areas to which they had been assigned during the war. The last of the six was Richard Dimbleby, whose area was Germany, from Cologne through to Berlin. From Hanover we travelled one wet Sunday morning to Belsen. Richard was in his own car – a new Rolls – which appeared to be having gear box trouble to such an extent that, when he did arrive, he commented, ‘If the wretched thing had got any worse I should have been forced to travel in reverse’.

On the camp-site at Belsen most of the film team went off to reconnoitre, leaving Richard and myself sitting in his car. It was the first time that he had been back since 1945. We sat there in silence for nearly 15 minutes and it was only too clear what emotions the place was stirring in him. The huge mass graves bearing the stark inscriptions, ‘Here lie buried 1,000 bodies’ and so on were all around us – more than enough to evoke the most bitter memories of 19 April 1945, the day on which he first entered the camp. He suddenly turned to me and said, ‘Do you know what’s strange about this place?’ I thought for a moment or two – there was nothing particular that I could pick out. ‘No.’ ‘There isn’t a single bird singing here.’ With that he relapsed once more into silence – a silence which only ended with the arrival of the rest of the team some minutes later, and the return to the demands of the present time.

Return to Belsen 1965

The morning was wet and the clouds so low that they almost made you crouch under them. On each side of the road there were dense pine trees with cold mist in their top branches. Eyelashes and hair were beaded with moisture, and dampness oozed into the bone. Half-past nine and the narrow road was empty – just a cleft between the pines. ‘Last time I came along this road,’ Richard said, ‘we drove like fools, because there were snipers on each side of it using the pinewoods for cover; they hung around here for quite a while. I think the turning is just a bit further on – there’s a kind of humped bridge, I think, and then we go to the left.’ The forests cleared and we turned to the left. After a few miles across the flat open heathland, we came to a small hamlet: just a few farms neatly kept, with hens and dogs and cows, children in, gumboots, and red roofs that swept down to the ground on each side of the house like the wings of an eagle. A man smoking a cigarette watched as we passed in our big car, and then, by the side of the road, the place name – Belsen.

Past the huge military camp of Hohne, then part of BAOR, once the headquarters of von Fritsch and the Panzers with an Officers’ Mess opened by Hitler; over more heathland we followed a sign to the Belsen memorial, drove through more pinewoods, and suddenly entered a car park which was empty except for some forest workmen playing football with a tennis ball in the cold rain. By the car park was the entrance to the concentration camp. It was an empty place, a cemetery in the middle of wild, silver birched and pinewooded country, the paths carefully laid out with well-brushed red gravel. Notices in different languages asked you to respect the dead lying there – about seventy thousand of them flung together in infamous anonymity. The shouts of the footballing woodmen faded as we walked across the heath to the monument. Total silence apart from the crunch of our feet on the gravel. And Richard said again: ‘Do you notice that the birds don’t sing here?’

‘I came here first with one of the medical officers,’ he recalled. ‘We’d already been told as we advanced into Germany that ahead of us there was a typhoid area. I went with the officer to investigate, and we came here. It was a spring morning, warm and dusty, totally unlike today, and it was a scene of hideous filth and rubbish with a smell which had hit us long before we reached the gates – a familiar smell to us during the war which the medical officer and myself both recognised. I remember turning to him and saying, “That’s the smell of death”. But even that didn’t prepare us for what we saw. This camp was the first of these places to be opened up and the report which I sent back from here caused a lot of worry at Broadcasting House. When they heard it, some people wondered if Dimbleby had gone off his head or something. I think it was only the fact that I’d been fairly reliable up to then that they believed the story. I broke down five times while I was recording it.’

We walked past a grave marked ‘Here lie 5,000 dead’ and then further on individual graves scattered in the heather – most of them marking the memory rather than the resting place of a murdered friend, son, mother or even whole family. Some were real graves, especially down by the woods where the women’s camp used to be. But these were just marked ‘An Unknown Body’. The trees dripped with rain and it was bitterly cold. In some way they were a link. ‘I remember these trees. Emaciated people sitting among them in piles of rubbish, corpses heaped up over there, the huts down by this track, people in a state of pain, misery and hopelessness. The guards here were frightened when we took over. They expected to be shot at once, and couldn’t understand the idea of a trial. One of them asked me if anything would happen to him. I was so angry that I turned on him and told him that he would be tried and I hoped hanged.’

Suddenly a weird moment: through the trees came a heavy roar like an aeroplane flying dangerously low. It grew in intensity shattering the damp silence. Richard recognised it: ‘Tanks. That’s the very noise that the people here must have heard when we moved in to liberate them. It wasn’t a moment of joy, though, because they were scared it might be the Russians.’ The noise gradually subsided as the tanks returned to Hohne from their exercises on the heath, and time folded up for a moment as the trees were suddenly peopled with ghosts.

Richard achieved the fusing of memory and emotion perfectly by two filmed statements. Every feature which we decided to include during our walk around the camp was mentioned, all in the correct order and nothing noted on paper: ‘Earth, conceal not the blood shed on thee’ – the epitaph of Belsen on the Jewish monument, a grave to a whole family, a square of marble laid down in the heather, the unknown dead down in the woods, some with small posies of flowers on their graves, the mass burial mounds of 800, 1,000, 5,000. And all of it told in simple prose empty of adjectives. He captured the silence, the mood, his own memories with a gift of style and sympathy which was matchless. ‘When you come back after twenty years, you find the Belsen concentration camp almost, though not entirely, unrecognisable. Gone are the huts and the compounds and the barbed wire and the poor tottering people that were staggering about and the SS guards, men and women – they’ve all disappeared. The furnace where they hit them on the head and pushed them in the fire: all this has gone. And on a day like this, cold and rainy, such a contrast to the spring day on which I came here twenty years ago, there’s nothing here but the desolation of heathland. All that you really find to remind you of this place, other than perhaps the lay-out of it which I can remember as I stand here now, are graves…

We spent four hours at the camp on this wet and cold morning. We walked everywhere, down gravel paths, across soaking heather, into the woods, stumbling over decaying boots and pieces of cloth and a mildewed truncheon. Apart from these fragments, the heather and the grass had reclaimed this evil ground. By the end of the morning we were as cold as the gravestones. But never once was there any complaint, and not until we were completely satisfied with the filming did we leave.

Then we drove away through the hamlet of Belsen to a roadside restaurant, and pondered at the irony.

It was a strange communion, this return of Richard Dimbleby to Belsen. The terrors of the place lingered in the trees, the monuments to suffering and courage were in every glance. A huge wooden cross stood on the site of the ovens. Wreaths, some of them five years old, some of them new, lay beneath it. There was a prayer written on a scrap of paper by a woman prisoner in the Ravensbruck concentration camp for those who were tormenting her. When Richard read it, there seemed to be a relevance to his own condition, to the strength with which he fought his pain, and to the way in which he lived with it. ‘O Lord, remember not only the men and women of good will but also those of ill will. But do not only remember all the suffering they have inflicted on us. Remember the fruits we bought, thanks to this suffering. Our comradeship, our loyalty, our humility, our courage, our generosity, the greatness of heart which has grown out of all this, and when they come to judgment, let all the fruits that we have borne be their forgiveness.’