‘Uninterested in anything except food’: the work of nurses feeding the liberated inmates of Bergen-Belsen

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

‘Uninterested in anything except food’: the work of nurses feeding the

liberated inmates of Bergen-Belsen

Jane Brooks

Aims and objectives. The aim of this article is to explore the work of nurses feeding and helping liberate the inmates of Bergen-

Belsen concentration camp in the spring of 1945.

Background. A considerable amount has been published on the relief of Belsen, but the majority of the research has focused on

the medical staff and the army in general. The exception to this is an article published by Ellen Ben-Sefer, but its analysis of the

actual work of the nurses is limited.

Design. The data are explored through the medium of nurses’ work, especially feeding work and its place in the historiography.

Methods. This article will offer an analysis of archival material, including official reports and personal testimony and published

primary sources.

Results. Nurses were very much hidden from the liberation picture, partly through government policy, partly because of

gendered ideologies and partly because of the desire of many to hide their memories. However, the data identify the pivotal role

of nurses in the saving of lives and rehabilitation of inmates. This article demonstrates this role through the work of feeding.

Conclusion. The nurses had to continually negotiate and renegotiate their place in the liberation. As women, their place at

Belsen was problematic and often thwarted by the ideologies of the day. Nevertheless, the services of registered nurses during

the war had proved indispensible. The Allied governments and Royal Army Medical Corps were ultimately to rely on their

professional expertise. The nurses’ work in the feeding of starving inmates demonstrates their value.

Relevance to clinical practice. This article demonstrates the importance of nurses’ feeding work and their role in the caring of

people’s humanity.

Key words: Bergen-Belsen, feeding regimes for starvation, history of nursing, liberation of concentration camps, nursing work,

World War II

Accepted for publication: 26 February 2012

Introduction

On 15 April 1945, the British Army entered Bergen-Belsen

concentration camp near the town of Celle in Northern

Germany. Once inside, the soldiers expressed horror at the

conditions of the inmates:

There were about 40,000 men and women in the camp when we

entered it (in addition to the 10,000 unburied bodies) and for living

conditions to be reasonable Belsen should not have housed more than

8,000 (Sington 1945, p. 46).

Although the Allies had known about concentration camps, it

has been suggested that the exaggeration of German atroc-

ities from World War I had made the British public cynical;

therefore, many of the accounts were treated as stories

(Brown 2008). Whether this is true, or perhaps the British

Author: Jane Brooks, RN, PhD, Lecturer, UK Centre for the History

of Nursing and Midwifery, School of Nursing, Midwifery and Social

Work, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK

Correspondence: Jane Brooks, Lecturer, School of Nursing,

Midwifery and Social Work, Jean McFarlane Building, University

Place, University of Manchester, Oxford Road, Manchester M13

9PL, UK. Telephone: +44 0161 306 7636; +44 0777 160 6226.

E-mail: [email protected]

� 2012 Blackwell Publishing Ltd

Journal of Clinical Nursing, doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2702.2012.04149.x 1

just did not want to believe that such atrocities could be

perpetrated, the early liberators were shocked.

In 1940, Bergen-Belsen became ‘home’ to French and

Belgian prisoners of war (POWs), followed in 1941 by

Soviet POWs. In April 1943, the first Jewish inmates were

brought to the camp. Unlike concentration camps such as

Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen was not created as a death camp,

but an exchange camp for Jews who could be used for

‘ransom’ with Allied nations, either for cash or for Germans

interned in Allied countries (Cesarani 2006, Shephard

2006). However, by the end of 1944, as the Allies were

pushing through Europe, Belsen became, ‘the last station, of

the Holocaust, to which prisoners from the death camps in

the East in the path of the Soviet Army were evacuated’

(Shephard 2006, p. 14). In Belsen, the inmates did not die in

gas chambers, but of starvation and disease, the worst cases

of which were in what was known as Camp I or the ‘horror

camp’ (Lattek 1997).

Between 1 January–1 March 1945, the camp’s numbers

rose from 18,000–42,000 and the inmates’ rations were cut.

They had probably been living on <800 calories per day

since January 1945, on a diet of 200 g of rye bread and

varying amounts of vegetable soup, in which the main

vegetable appeared to be a mangold-wurzel (a beet vegetable

mainly grown for cattle-fodder) (Lipscombe 1945a, p. 313).

Between 1–31 March, 17,000 persons died in Belsen, two of

whom were Anne Frank and her sister Margot (Cesarani

2006). From 1–15 April, the day of liberation, a further

18,000 died. Thus, nearly 50,000 died in this camp in the

course of two months, from hunger, disease and despair

(Anon 1946). It was into these conditions that the British

medical teams arrived on 16 April 1945.

Over the next six weeks, members of the British Army, the

Red Cross, St John Ambulance and the Society of Friends

remained in the camp trying to save the lives of those who

could be saved, bury the dead and ultimately burn the camp.

Amongst these workers, there were a number of Sisters from

the Queen Alexandra’s Imperial Military Nursing Service and

its Reservists (hereafter QAs), as well as nurses from

Australia, New Zealand and the USA. Nevertheless, Derek

Sington, one of the first officers to enter the camp, and whose

memoir is a crucial publication in the story of the liberation,

barely mentions the nurses. When nurses do enter his

account, it is not clear whether he is referring to internee

nurses, the German nurses who were volunteered to help, or

nurses related to the Allied forces. Moreover, nurses’ work is

absent from much of the primary material as well as more

recent historiography. It is the purpose of this article to

establish a space for the Army and relief nurses in the

narrative of the liberation of Belsen, through the exploration

of one area of their vital work, that of the feeding of the

starving inmates.

Background

This article is written with two essential criticisms of the

Belsen liberation narratives in mind. First that too often the

victims, who were mostly Jews, occupy only a minor role in

the stories, as against the liberation forces’ personalities. This

criticism provided the underpinning to the 1997 publication,

Belsen in History and Memory, half of which was devoted to

the testimony of survivors (Reilly et al. 1997, p. 14). The

second criticism is that the Belsen story is used to demon-

strate the good fight of the British against the evils of Nazism,

whereas in fact, there was an awareness in Britain of the

subjugation and extermination of the Jews long before 1945

(Reilly et al. 1997, p. 12). Indeed the war correspondent ME

Allan who was sent to Belsen in May 1945 maintained, ‘I

suppose we did nothing about it [the concentration camps]

for two reasons, one that most of the prisoners were Jews

(only half in Belsen’s case) and secondly that to interfere with

another country’s prison methods would call for a declara-

tion of war’ (Allan 1945). It should, however, be noted that

Allan was mistaken about the percentage of Jews at Belsen; it

was according to others, 90% of the inmate population at

liberation (Pfirter 1960, p. 2). Both these criticisms are

acknowledged. However, the purpose of this article is to

examine the nursing work, especially in relation to the

feeding, and apologies are therefore made for the heralding of

the Allied liberating force rather than the lives of the victims

themselves.

From the 1990s onwards, there has been a proliferation of

academic interest in the Holocaust and such studies provide a

background to this research. Reilly et al. (1997) is a key early

text and provides a crucial examination of the history of the

camp, its liberation and its survivors. Bardgett and Cesarani’s

(2006) edited book offers a wide-ranging analysis of the

liberation and rehabilitation work of Belsen in 1945. Nev-

ertheless, as with other texts, the work of the nurses is absent,

or nurses are considered, but frequently not identified as

nurses. For example, Molly Silva Jones and Myrtle Beardwell

are simply referred to as ‘British women’ (Steinert 2006,

p. 67) and Muriel Blackman is quoted but identified as British

Red Cross, rather than Registered Nurse (Steinert 2006,

p. 69). The exception to this is the chapter that deals with the

eyewitness accounts, in which Silva Jones’ account is

described as her professional status; she is, however, the

only nurse to be thus considered, and there is very limited

consideration of her nursing work (Barnett et al. 2006,

p. 54).

J Brooks


2 Journal of Clinical Nursing

Weindling (2006) offers one of the most critical analyses of

the liberation, arguing that the response was wholly inade-

quate to the need. He maintains that although there were

Jewish and Quaker nursing teams ready to be posted into

disaster areas, the British military refused to call upon them,

calling instead upon the services of 97 British medical

students from the London teaching hospitals. Harrison

(2004) both acknowledges the inadequacy of the medical

response and accepts the limitations that were imposed upon

the teams, especially in regards to the feeding of the inmates.

Flanagan and Bloxham’s (2005) eyewitness record of the

liberation is a crucial text and does include a number of

testimonies by professional nurses, including references to

food and feeding. However, very little detail of the actual

work carried out is provided. Shephard (2006) considers the

nursing sisters, but he does so only cursorily, again with very

little discussion of the work undertaken by them.

More recently, a number of historians of nursing have

turned their interest to World War II and the liberation of

concentration camps. Armstrong-Reid’s (2010) article on the

Canadians in United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation

Administration (UNRRA) demonstrates the ‘insatiable

demands for nursing services’ (p. 1). Starns (2000) offers a

brief examination of the liberation of Belsen and uses the

personal testimony of Nurse Anita Kelly, although Starns

provides no further information about this nurse, nor can

Kelly’s name be found in the lists of relief personnel (Anon

2009). Moreover, Starns’ exploration of the work of the

nurses is limited. Ben-Sefer’s (2009) article on the nursing

care at Belsen provides an excellent background to the work

of the professional nurses and nursing orderlies. Her exam-

ination is particularly useful as she uses the personal

testimony of a New Zealand nurse, Phyllis Jason Smith, with

whom Ben-Sefer had personal contact. Importantly for this

paper, Ben-Sefer does identify the crucial aspect of food and

feeding. However, this is within a more general discussion of

nursing care, rather than nursing work.

Design and methods

If much of the historiography on the liberation of Belsen has

failed to explore the nurses’ presence, and more particularly

for this paper, their work, this is largely because of the limited

primary source material. According to Reilly, because the

female nurses were not allowed in the horror camp, there

were very few photographs of them, resulting in their absence

from the visual memory (Reilly 1997, p. 157). It is arguable

that this rationale only offers a limited response to questions

of the hiddenness of nurses in the narratives of the liberation

of Belsen, questions that were being raised at the time, despite

very different attitudes towards women’s abilities. The

reasons seem deep-seated and varied. First ‘rules demand

that these British women of Belsen, whose fortitude saved

thousands of lives remains anonymous’ (Anon 1945a).

Moreover, although there were those who felt very strongly

that the work of the women needed to be known – one such

woman being Iris ‘Fluffy’ Ogilvie Bower a nurse with the

RAF who took part in the air-evacuations of inmates from

Belsen (Anon 2006), there were many of the women

themselves who would never speak of their experiences in

Belsen. For example, research undertaken by British Broad-

casting Corporation (BBC) on the ‘People’s War’ identified

several nurses who had worked at Belsen during the libera-

tion. Ethel Bardsley, who had been as a QA, was posted to

Belsen on 18 May 1945, ‘Ethel refused to discuss what she

had witnessed at Belsen – not even with her family’ (BBC

2004). Trindles (1999) maintained that, ‘we had no-one to

talk to, we just had to keep going’ (Green 2003).

A further reason for the absence of the nurses from the

narrative may have been the unease that their male medical

colleagues felt about their presence. Gonin (c. 1945) admitted

that, ‘the problems particular to the ladies would be discussed

first, about eleven o’clock they would be dismissed, gin,

brandy and champagne would appear and we would finish

our business by twelve or one in the morning’. In an article in

the Nursing Mirror in May of 1945, decrying the decision to

use medical students instead of trained nurses to care for the

inmates, ‘What would Florence Nightingale have done – our

founder and ideal – she who ‘gate-crashed’ the Crimea? She

would have raised her voice and called for a hundred – two

hundred nurses…’ (Anon 1945b, p. 82). The issue was raised

in the British Medical Journal two months later. Although the

article commended the work of medical students, civilian

workers and research teams, ‘so far no mention has been

made of the work of the Nursing Army sisters’ (Roberts &

Potter 1945, p. 100). Nevertheless, although there are many

missing narratives from the nurses, there is material that has

proved a rich source of information.

This article is based on archival and published data from a

number of sources. The main archives used were the Imperial

War Museum, the Wellcome Trust Archives and the archives

at the Army Medical Museum. These facilities provided much

of the personal testimony and official reports. Several of the

diaries and letters provide useful information related to the

impressions of Belsen and concerns for the inmates, for

example, the diary of Muriel Blackman and letters from

Margaret Ward (a Red Cross worker, not a nurse). However,

these archives offer little information related to the work

undertaken. This lack of consideration of actual nursing

work is representative of archival material associated with

Original article Nursing work and the liberation of Bergen-Belsen


Journal of Clinical Nursing 3

nursing, which is essentially a private enterprise (Hallett

2009). The diary of Sister Molly Silva Jones and memoir of

Anny Pfirter provide atypical pictures, focusing as they do on

the experiences of nursing at Belsen; they were thus critical

texts for this paper. The Royal College of Nursing Archives,

Edinburgh, hold the Nursing Times and Nursing Mirror for

the period. Finally, the John Rylands University Library of

the University of Manchester holds the British Medical

Journal and The Lancet. All these journals published articles

based on the medical relief. Published memoirs and letters

were also used, especially those of two nurses, Sister Myrtle

Beardwell of the British Red Cross and the Australian

Matron Muriel Doherty of UNRRA. Therefore, although

the data may be sparse, where the material does identify the

work of the nurses, it is clear that they were vital to the

rehabilitation of the inmates. The impact of their work will

be demonstrated through the nursing work of feeding the

starving.

Findings

Uninterested in anything except food (Roberts & Potter 1945,

p. 100).

On the arrival of the British Army on 15 April, the inmates of

Belsen had been without food and water for seven days, and

this after a prolonged period of semi-starvation (Bird 1945).

As Muriel Doherty stated in one of her letters, ‘I believe the

cries of ‘‘Essen, Essen’’ (‘‘Food, Food’’) were heart-rending’

(Cornell & Russell 2000, p. 48). Derrick Sington remem-

bered the arrival of the food trucks and the kitchens

beginning to cook stews for the inmates (Sington 1945,

p. 38). Soon the food was distributed, including ‘compo

rations’ that were the packs containing enough food for a

soldier for 14 days: tinned bacon, sausages, steak and kidney

pudding, butter, cheese and jam. The results in many cases

were disastrous, the inmates’ malnourished bodies were

unable to cope with the rich food and an estimated 2000

died because of it (Shephard 2006, p. 42). Volunteer Aid

Detachment nurse, Norna Alexander put the situation into

stark relief when she remembered, ‘the Red Cross sent

parcels, and we sort of, I suppose it wasn’t our fault, but we

handed them out and then they ate them and then they died’

(Alexander 1995). Anny Pfirter, a Red Cross Nursing Sister,

recalled how armed guards were placed on duty as, ‘patients

who could stand threw themselves on the food vessels

snatched at platefuls of food and fought like savages for a

slice of bread’ (Pfirter 1960, p. 6). Moreover, it was the

healthiest inmates who managed to access to food, eating it

themselves or hiding it somewhere for later. So the

reasonably healthy died of liberal feeding, whilst the weakest

still did not have nourishment (Lipscombe 1945a, p. 314,

Shephard 2006, p. 42). Sington recalled that within two days,

it was realised that special diets were required, but that it was

some days before these arrived (Sington 1945, p. 53).

Feeding regimes

Whilst the medical and nursing teams of the 32 Casualty

Clearing Station (CCS) organised the hospital, the 11th Light

Field Ambulance organised the evacuation of the horror

camp and also the cooking and distribution of food to its

inmates. Much of the data on this aspect of the medical relief

have come from the London medical students, who began to

arrive from the end of April and Doctors Janet Vaughan from

the Medical Research Council and P A Meiklejohn, a dietetic

expert with UNRRA. Given the importance of Vaughan and

Meiklejohn in this period, it is not surprising that their work

at Belsen has been heralded. Vaughan later became Dame

Janet Vaughan, Principal of Somerville College, Oxford, and

Meiklejohn had earned his fame as a medical officer during

the Bengal famine. Nevertheless, the focus on their work and

that of the medical students, who undertook the nursing

work in the horror camp, has further undermined the

presence of nurses from the historical picture.

According to Lesley Hardman, the Jewish chaplain with

the liberating forces, Meiklejohn had been sent to Bengal to

tackle the situation and, ‘made a success of it’ (Hardman &

Goodman 1958, p. 49). However, the Bengal famine mixture,

which he then took to Belsen, did not meet with the same

success there (Meiklejohn 1945). The mixture, a combination

of dried milk, sugar, flour and bread, needed to be combined

with vegetables, soup, meat and salt before the inmates

would countenance it. Both Colonel Johnston and WRF

Collis MD maintained that the feeding of Proteosylates [sic]

had dramatic results in the reduction in deaths by starvation

(Collis 1945, p. 814, Johnston 1945a,b). More usually

known as protein hydrolysates, they are more easily absorbed

than pure protein sources and are successful is ensuring

nutrition in the seriously ill (Koopman et al. 2009). But

Johnston and Collis’s summations were probably overly

positive. Colonel Lipscombe specifically stated that protein

hydrolysates did not prove successful for several reasons.

First the inmates, many of whom were from Eastern Europe

could not tolerate the sweetness of the liquid. Second, gastric

or nasal tubes required more supervision than was possible,

‘better results might have been obtained with a larger staff of

skilled nurses’ (Lipscombe 1945a, p. 314). Johnston even

admitted in one report that, ‘medical skill is of secondary

importance’ and that the most important resource

J Brooks



requirement is nurses (Johnston 1945a, p. 3), a statement that

seems to cast doubt on the decision to send medical students

rather than registered nurses. Intravenous and intra-nasal

hydrolysates were used in severe cases, but the psychological

damage was immense (Collis 1945, p. 815, Lipscombe

1945a, p. 314, Cornell & Russell 2000, p. 50). Several of

the diaries and memoirs identified the belief that some of the

Nazi doctors had experimented on inmates with intravenous

benzene and creosote (Cornell & Russell 2000). Molly Silva

recalled:

Difficulty was experienced in giving injections in the wards at first

because the patients thought this was a prelude to being sent to the

crematorium. The mad doctors of Belsen had injected benzene, for

what reason it was not known, perhaps to make them burn better

(Silva Jones, p. 11)

If this had been a Nazi practice then it is understandable that

the inmates should have been wary of intravenous feeding by

the liberating forces.

Not all patients were fed with the Bengal mixture, but

rather they were divided into three groups for rations. Scale

one, which consisted of the Bengal mixture, was for the

starving and seriously ill and involved two hourly feeds.

These feeds contained, ‘one ounce of sugar, half an ounce of

salt, two litres of skimmed fresh milk, and three compound

vitamin tablets’ (Cornell & Russell 2000, p. 49). In the

absence of sufficient fresh milk, dried was used, unfortunately

Doherty continued, this was not well tolerated by all the

inmates (Cornell & Russell 2000). Scale two was for those

fully convalescent patients and hospital workers who

required extra nourishment, and scale three was for hospital

patients not fully convalescent (Cornell & Russell 2000,

p. 48). Those on scale two and three all received dried milk,

sugar, bread, tinned vegetables tinned meat, potatoes, salt,

concentrated soup and ascorbic acid tablets. The main

differences between the two diets were the additional flour

and dehydrated vegetables for those on scale two and the

additional butter or margarine for those on scale three (Wood

1945). If the most celebrated narratives of the feeding, centre

on the work of the medical students in the horror camp, the

feeding work of the nurses took place in the hospitals

required great skill and patience:

Behaved like animals and clamoured for food (McFarlane 1945,

p. 9).

Despite the patients now being ‘healthy’, the constant need

for food did not abate. Sister Biggs recalled how even after six

weeks in the hospital, they still ‘eat like pigs and never seem

to have enough’ (Biggs 1945).’ The tone of Sister Biggs

description is particularly pejorative. She continued by

stating what food and cigarettes were given to the patients,

‘yet still they are not satisfied’ (Biggs 1945). Nevertheless, her

description of the feeding of the patients belies this apparent

lack of care and demonstrates the patience and skill with

which the nurses fed the inmates, despite the acknowledge-

ment that many would die:

Then came the job of trying to feed them, some were so starved and

emaciated that they had lost all power of swallowing at all, they were

fed with tea spoons, and as fast as we put the soup in, it dribbled out

of the corners of their mouths, this went on for days and days, a few

of them were eventually able to swallow, but the majority of them

died (Biggs 1945)

Moreover, this time and patience was required when there

were 150 patients to one nursing sister, a situation not helped

by the range of languages spoken by the patients (Elvidge

1945). Roberts and Potter (1945) describe the horrendous

difficulties under which the nurses fed their patients. McFar-

lane, a Red Cross worker, not a nurse, recalled arriving in the

hospital, without ‘the vaguest idea what to do in a hospital’,

and realising that she had 142 patients who required feeding

(McFarlane 1945, p. 9). All the nurses and the untrained

workers in the hospital described the inmates always being

hungry and never satisfied with their rations. The fear of

being without food caused even the dying to horde food,

risking vermin and more infection; moreover, fights were not

unheard of during meal-times (McFarlane 1945, Roberts &

Potter 1945, p. 100, Mollinson 1946, p. 5). Silva Jones

maintained that the cries of the patients for food, ‘will haunt

the ears of those who heard them for a long time to come’

(Silva Jones 1945, p. 4). She continued that patients who

were capable may take food from another, who was

incapable of resisting, ‘then the patient would probably

vomit or experience acute abdominal pain and on more than

one occasion died’ (Silva Jones 1945, p. 4). Such incidents

were clearly frightening but although the nurses were scared

by the behaviour of the patients, the tone of their writing

seems always kind. Indeed, Beardwell exemplified this when

discussing the super-human strength of patients when it came

to food:

We were told to give them only half cups of black coffee or soup. We

soon discovered that if they took more they just died, but the great

difficulty was to keep the stronger ones from taking the drinks from

the weaker ones. I well remember going into one room with a pail of

black coffee. There were about eight women in that room. They came

at me like wild animals. They were nude, of course, and with their

long claw-like fingers they pulled and grabbed at my hair and neck. I

was alarmed and called for help and a Hungarian came to my rescue

(Beardwell c., 1953, p. 43)




Muriel Knox Doherty’s recollections of this time are equally

poignant:

Feeding the victims of starvation and disease was in itself a colossal

and oft times heartbreaking undertaking. The moment food

appeared, those who could, oblivious of their stark nakedness,

staggered forward from their beds, gaunt spectres, with arms

outstretched… (Cornell & Russell 2000, p. 62)

The inmates did not understand the importance of small but

nutritious quantities (Fisher 1945, p. 6), and some even

complained that they had been better fed under the

Germans (Cornell & Russell 2000). Problems of inadequate

rations were compounded by the lack of nurses, which

prevented them from ensuring that the patients not only

received their food but were also helped with feeding

(Mollinson 1946). According to Sister Mary Bond, QA with

the 29th British General Hospital, these problems were

exacerbated in cases of Cancrum Oris, an extensive ulcer-

ation of the cheeks caused by malnutrition that ultimately

created holes in the cheeks. This made eating difficult and

skilled postprandial mouth care, essential (Bond 1994,

p. 48). In an attempt to alleviate the staffing crisis, internee

nurses were engaged, but this caused problems as they

would only feed their own compatriots, ‘In afternoon Polish

nurse refused food to Hungarian patient and when com-

plaint made [sic], slapped patient’s face. Arranged for

removal of Polish nurse from these rooms’ (Blackman

1945). The range of problems that the nursing sisters were

required to overcome to ensure adequate feeding of their

patients was therefore unprecedented. Given that it was not

just the physical aspects of feeding the patients, which

concentrated the minds of the nurses, they clearly required

substantial skill, patience and a well-developed understand-

ing of the human condition. Anny Pfirter remembered one

patient, a woman of about 35, who she described as, ‘eating

her food in a mechanical fashion’:

…she let fall her spoon, the nurse picked it up, wiped it and gave it

back to her. The poor thing did not seem to understand this very

natural gesture and started at the nurse with astonishment. A

moment later, when she thought that nobody was looking, she threw

her spoon on the floor; again the nurse picked it up, wiped it and gave

it back to her. Her face lit up and she said, is if in a daze: ‘‘The nurse

stoops down… for me’’ (Pfirter 1960, p. 9–10)

Discussion and conclusions

In a letter to her mother in May 1945, British Red Cross

worker, Margaret Ward commented how the task of reha-

bilitating 60,000 starving, diseased and mentally scared

people, ‘is just so gigantic that I can’t think how it will ever

come to an end’ (Ward 1945, XV). There were many aspects

to the saving of inmates, including the treatment of the

physical horrors of typhus and diarrhoea and the rehabilita-

tion of persons tortured, sometimes for many years. The

liberation of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp was an

unimaginable task for all concerned, not least the female

nurses from the Army, British Red Cross and Friends’

Ambulance Service. One of the most important aspects of

treatment and care was the nourishment of the starving, and

it is on this particular aspect of care that this article has

focused. The work of the nurses in this task was vital to

saving the physical lives of the inmates, but also, as this

article has demonstrated, returning the inmates’ humanity.

One of the medical students, Russell Barton, admitted that

they [the medical students], ‘were not really professionally

competent to deal with the profusion of illness’ (Barton 1968,

p. 3083). However, he makes no mention of the work of the

nurses nor does he appear to wonder why the professional

nurses were not called upon the care for the inmates in Camp

I. It is arguable that this is one of the reasons why nurses are

so absent from the narratives. First, many of the recollections

were written by the medical students and doctors from the

Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC). The lack of writing by

nurses themselves has frequently been identified by historians

of nursing (McGann & Mortimer 2004, Hallett 2009,

Hawkins 2010). In the case of the liberation of Belsen, their

absence was exacerbated by the desire of many of the nurses

to forget. Second, much of the historiography has focused on

the emergency work of the medical staff and students

especially in relation to the clearing of Camp I, into which

the nurses were prevented from going. Nevertheless, this lack

of nurses from the narrative appears generally to be one of

omission rather than commission. For example, feeding

work, which has been the focus of this article, is generally

considered nursing work. However, even in this, the nurses

have not been central to the account. In his discussion of the

treatment of the starving inmates, Lieutenant-Colonel Lips-

combe RAMC, of the 32 CCS, described, ‘the chief duties

therefore of the medical officers and other workers…’

(Lipscombe 1945b, p. 9); the nurses are therefore conflated

with ‘others’. It is arguable that in the majority of cases, this

omission was not deliberate, more just part of the hiddenness

of nurses and their work. Notwithstanding these methodo-

logical difficulties, this article has demonstrated that the

female nurses’ skills and patience in the feeding of the

liberated inmates were invaluable to both saving their lives in

the acute phase and also and the rehabilitation for their

future lives.

J Brooks



Relevance for clinical practice

Patient nutrition is an important aspect of nursing work and

yet is reported as being frequently forgotten (Foster et al.

2005, Nursing & Midwifery Council 2006, The Royal

Mencap Society 2006). This article has demonstrated that

the feeding work of nurses is essential to patient care and

people’s survival. Moreover, it is noted that in crisis

situations, the work of nurses in fundamental work such as

patient feeding can be more vital to patient survival than

medical care. It is hoped that in reading this article, nurses in

clinical practice will take ownership of this essential work

and that patient nutrition will improve, as its worth is

acknowledged.

Acknowledgements

I should like to thank the Wellcome Trust for the research

expenses for archival work.

Contributions

Study design: JB; data collection and analysis: JB and

manuscript preparation: JB.

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