page_title: Arnold Peter Meiklejohn
section_title: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
hierarchical_section_title: Arnold Peter Meiklejohn / Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
caption_attribution_description: English: The Liberation of Bergen-belsen Concentration Camp, May 1945 A group of British medical students employed at Belsen discuss some of the medical problems and clinical test results experienced during the day with E M De Greff, British Red Cross Relief Officer and second in command of the medical students during a daily evening conference. Ninety seven British medical students from London teaching hospitals volunteered for relief work in Belsen.
context_page_description: Arnold Peter Meiklejohn was a lecturer in nutrition at the University of Edinburgh who in 1945, was given the responsibility of administering the starvation diet to the severely malnourished and dying inmates at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation by British troops. In this role, he supervised just under 100 London volunteer medical students who were sent to the camp to assist him, at the request of Brigadier Hugh Glyn-Hughes and the war office.
  In 1947, at the request of the Medical Research Council, he assessed and reported on the state of nutrition of German civilians.
  He wrote a number of books based on nutrition, particularly errors of metabolism.
context_section_description: On 29 April 1945, Meiklejohn arrived at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shortly after its liberation by British troops with the responsibility of administering the starvation diet to the severely malnourished and dying inmates.
  He led one of two teams sent on behalf of UNRRA, the other team being led by Janet Vaughan. At the time, the death rate at the camp was estimated at 500 or 600 per day when he was sent either 95, 96 or 97 volunteer medical students from London medical schools, to assist him in camp I, at the request of Brigadier Hugh Glyn-Hughes and the war office. Here, typhus and starvation were prevalent. They included Michael Hargrave, whose diary, later published as Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal, details his month-long experience at the camp and describes the introductory briefing on the challenges they would face, given by Meiklejohn. Other students included Alex Paton who published his memoirs of Belsen in the British Medical Journal in 1981 and David Philip Bowler who later had a career in community child health, for which he was awarded the Advance Australia Award for his work in the care of Aboriginal children. Some of the students memoirs were used by author Ben Shephard in the book After Daybreak: The Liberation of Belsen, 1945. On being questioned about the achievements of the students, Meiklejohn responded that "they had restored the moral order".
  Feeding in camp I of Belsen was a major problem. Generous rich food was not tolerated by inmates who had starved for so long. Despite a number of cookhouses and co-ordinating offices, simply handing out food was not enough. Meiklejohn wondered why a mixture that worked so well in Bengal was so disastrous in Belsen. It was, according to the rabbi Reverend Leslie Hardman, "revoltingly sweet". Meiklejohn postulated that the unpopular Bengal mixture, made of dried milk, flour, sugar and molasses which was used in the Bengal famine of 1943 likely halved the death rate from starvation. People in the students' hospital lived due to the work of the students and he commended them for their organisation. The mixture was much too sweet for eastern Europeans.
  Meiklejohn also led the postmortems of some of those that died by starvation and his findings included extreme muscle wasting, swollen ankles and feet, small hearts and fluid around the heart. Almost all of those that had postmortems had tuberculosis (TB) of varying types including miliary tuberculosis and chronic TB. The stomach was sometimes found to be small from atrophy or large from gaseous distension and the large intestine could be atrophied or ulcerated.
caption: British medical students employed at Belsen, May 1945[4]
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