The greatest crime in history

Brigadier Peter Vaux was a stickler for the rules of war, but he once confessed to me that he nearly shot a German POW. He'd been an intelligence officer in 7 Armoured Division in North Africa - one of the 'Desert Rats' - and the prisoner was just an ordinary infantryman but in his pocket were some photographs.

They included a street somewhere in Europe, with naked women running along it. One of them, obviously frightened, was holding her hands between her legs. "Who are these women?" Vaux asked, struggling to contain the anger in his voice. The man was quite startled. "Who? Them? Only Jews."

The snapshot that almost caused Vaux to use his revolver was a small part of something unprecedented in scale and cruelty - a systematic attempt to exterminate an entire race. Across Poland, the Baltic States and thousands of miles into the Soviet Union, Hitler's armies were followed by Einsatzgruppen - 'cleansing squads' - with orders to clear designated areas of the race-enemy.

Jews were rounded up and either shipped to the nearest ghetto to await employment as slave labour, or taken into quarries and forests and killed. At Babyn Yar, just outside Kyiv, 30,000 people were ordered to strip so their clothes could be re-purposed and then made to line up until it was their turn to be shot into a mass grave.

In some town squares, locals came to watch or even join in the carnage. A famous photograph of a half-dressed Jewish woman, fleeing from a gleeful gang of teenage boys, bleeding from her mouth, reveals what was called "the holocaust of bullets".

The first experiments with gas began in autumn 1941, using vans with exhaust fumes directed into a sealed passenger section. Drivers were told to keep going until the screaming stopped. The first purpose-built gas chamber opened at Chelmno in Poland shortly before Christmas. And by now the Nazis had found something more deadly than engine exhaust: Zyklon B.

The architects of the Holocaust set themselves a logistical challenge: the murder of between eight and ten million people. That included Roma, homosexuals and other minorities, but the overwhelming majority would be Jews. Simply transporting the victims would require a substantial proportion of the available transport in the east.

The Jews of Western Europe were to receive no mercy either. Local officials and police in France and many other countries passed anti-Jewish laws, collated lists and carried out arrests, and sadly that included those of the occupied British Channel Islands. The only substantial exception was Denmark.

In Holland, Jewish families were told to attend synagogues where the Dutch police picked them up. They were allowed to take one suitcase each. There are some especially poignant photographs of families lining up in the street, respectable people in good coats holding their cases while their children clutch a favourite toy.

All went so easily that a key architect of the Holocaust, Adolf Eichmann, remarked: "The transports run so smoothly that it is a pleasure to see." Deportees were dispatched to locations in Eastern Europe and told they were to be resettled. In fact, most were murdered within hours of arrival, generally in gas chambers. During the course of the war 107,000 Dutch Jews were sent to camps, mostly Auschwitz and Sobibor. Only 5,000 survived. It's the most efficient kill ratio achieved by the Nazis in any of the nations they conquered.

Soon tens of thousands of Jews a week were being transported in cattle trucks to their deaths. André Lettich remembered his journey. "Crammed one against another, we suffered terribly from thirst, and we were obliged to sacrifice a small corner of the cattle car for calls of nature."

People put their mouths to knotholes in the wooden walls for fresh air, he recalled, or stood on each other's shoulders to reach the tiny windows high up. There was no food and no water and children were soon asking unanswerable questions.

"Where are we going? Why can't I have a drink?" One of the purposes of this train journey was to remove such props to ordinary life. To take doctors and piano teachers and professors and nurses and turn them into something resembling the normal occupants of these wagons; weak, unyielding and already half ready for death.

We recently commemorated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Belsen camp by British forces, although the word 'liberation' hardly seems appropriate given the tens of thousands of dead and dying people discovered there.

Belsen was never a murder camp like Auschwitz, but it became one of the most infamous sites of the Holocaust because the systematic neglect of its inhabitants created mass starvation and an epidemic of typhus.

There are no truly good news stories about the Holocaust and nor should there be. But in my new book, 1945 The Reckoning, I do highlight the remarkable medical relief work at Belsen, and especially British doctor Douglas Peterkin.

Within hours of entering the camp, Peterkin and the other medics began to conjure order out of chaos. Former guards were rounded up then sent at the point of British rifles to bury all the bodies in newly dug pits. Newsmen arrived so this terrible process was filmed: emaciated corpses stacked in lorries, nightmarish piles of twisted arms, legs and heads pushed along by bulldozer tumbling, a defining image of the Holocaust.

Peterkin's commander, Major 'Johnny' Johnson, experimented with "famine relief powders" and dreamed up "the human laundry" whereby they used hosepipes and soap to wash survivors, burnt their rags, dusted them with DDT and gave them fresh clean clothes free of the typhus-spreading lice. Peterkin volunteered for the worst job of all. He was one of the doctors responsible for entering the huts, separating the living from the dead and deciding who had the best chance of benefitting from 'the laundry'.

Inevitably he caught typhus. In the unit's 'war diary', his commander Mervyn Gonin wrote that Captain Peterkin "was responsible for the collection and loading on to ambulance cars of over 7,000 internees. He worked daily... amid the most appalling hygienic conditions inside huts where the majority of internees were suffering from the most virulent infectious diseases known to man. In addition to disease and starvation I have seen Captain Peterkin dealing with mass hysteria amongst internees in a manner which is worthy of the highest praise".

People continued to die but for those carried to the 'laundry', and able to tolerate the supplements on offer, the changes could be rapid and remarkable. Three quarters of the survivors were women and girls who had been living in a desperate, exhausted and emaciated state for months.

The emergency equipment lists cabled to Army HQ never mentioned items such as lipstick or face powder, but Gonin discovered that they could be lifesavers too.

"A very large quantity of lipstick arrived," he recalled. "This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things... it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance... Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering around with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips.

"At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on their arm. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity."

Even as they worked 18-hour days, the doctors understood that they were involved in something extraordinary and historic.

Face to face with living - or barely living - evidence of one of the greatest atrocities of all time, they were determined to try anything. Replacing tattered, lice-infested camp uniforms and ensuring make-up was available for anyone who wanted it, were part of the cure.

Once people were able to stand, eat and wash, and dressed in something that resembled the clothing of their former lives, Peterkin observed "the change was very marked, as self-respect and a sense of responsibility returned".

Another clever experiment helped with the food supplements. A bland and chemical-tasting 'Bengal Famine Mixture', made largely from rice and sugar, was effective but far from popular - just the taste of it made some inmates vomit. Someone suggested paprika might make it a little bit more like the food survivors remembered. And it did.

There are many lessons from the Holocaust - about fanaticism, dehumanisation and our species' capacity for cruelty toward 'the other'. And I was powerfully reminded of the 'naked woman' photograph Peter Vaux discovered when, on 7/10, Hamas proudly live-streamed its pursuit and murder of Jewish girls fleeing a music festival.

But in this one story of live-saving ingenuity in Belsen, I hope something positive emerges; how men and women like Douglas Peterkin found the fortitude to confront unprecedented evil.

As I write in my new book: "Of the rightness of the cause, and Britain's pivotal role, there can be no doubt.

"Some empires build concentration camps and some build human laundries. The British Empire built both those things in the course of its rise and fall, but in the time of Douglas Peterkin, it should be remembered for the good that it did and the courage it displayed."

Phil Craig is the author of 1945: Reckoning - War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World (Hodder, £25)