After Daybreak
Chapter One
The Approaching End
“WE ALL FEEL the end approaching,” Hanna Lévy-Hass wrote in her diary on 30 August 1944. “We are gripped . . . by a mad delusion that all will soon be over.” A schoolteacher from Sarajevo, she had been rounded up by the Gestapo six weeks earlier and sent to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; but now, with Allied armies victorious in Normandy and the Red Army advancing through Poland, she was hopeful that she would soon be liberated.
Belsen was an unusual camp. Its origins went back to a meeting held in an ugly concrete bunker in East Prussia on 10 December 1942. On that day, Heinrich Himmler, the mild-mannered, bespectacled man in charge of organising the systematic murder of millions of people all over Europe, drove over from his own luxurious field headquarters nearby for one of his frequent conferences with the Führer, Adolf Hitler, at the Wolfsschanze.
They met at a pivotal moment in the war. On the Russian front, the 200,000 men of General Paulus’s Sixth Army had just been cut off by a Soviet counterattack at Stalingrad and, although Hitler was cho ... read full excerpt from After Daybreak: The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen, 1945 ebook
