page_title: London medical students at Belsen
section_title: Roles
hierarchical_section_title: London medical students at Belsen / Belsen / Roles
caption_attribution_description: Photographs of the personnel involved with the aid to inmates of Belsen Concentration Camp ... including photographs of the inmates and treatment. Photographs: &#160;Delousing of internees and emaciated body in ward Archives &amp; Manuscripts Keywords: Allen Percival Prior; Bergen-Belsen
context_page_description: In early April 1945, the British Red Cross and the War Office, at the request of the British Army, called for 100 volunteers from among medical students at London hospitals to assist in feeding starving Dutch children who had been liberated from German occupation by advancing Allied forces. However, in the meantime, British troops had liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the students were diverted there on the day they were due to travel to the Netherlands. The students had previously spent most of the Second World War at school and in medical training.
  The students were tasked with taking over one or two of the 200 camp huts each, with the responsibility of cleaning and feeding the survivors and supervising a fair distribution of food. Their work was instrumental in reducing the death rate from over 500 a day at liberation to less than 100 a day by mid-May 1945.
  Sources show that twelve students came from each of Guy's Hospital, St Thomas', St Mary's, The London and University College, eleven from Westminster, nine from St Bartholomew's, eight from the Middlesex and the remainder from King's.
context_section_description: Initially, the role of the students was to take over one or two of the 200 huts each, with the responsibility of getting them cleaned (human laundry) and supervising the feeding of and fair distribution of food to the inmates. The association of intravenous feeding and Nazi activities rendered this kind of feeding inappropriate. An unpopular mixture known as the "Bengal mixture" was used for feeding. In addition to malnutrition and starvation, tuberculosis, typhus and cancrum oris were common, and later Wernicke's encephalopathy and pellagra.
  Some of the challenges the students faced were reported by student Thomas Gibson, who disclosed the difficulties in caring for people when  medicine and adequate nursing help was lacking, on the background of the dilemma of how “to explain to a Pole who speaks little French”, and how difficult it was “to give a course of sulphonamide to a Russian with erysipelas who only speaks Russian". The Lack of medical aid, equipment, drugs and hospital facilities meant improvising and making the best out of what was there.
  Michael Hargrave, in his journal, described the human laundry, assembled in two adjacent stables where 17 tables were each surrounded by four German nurses, who washed the inmates, covered them in DDT and then wrapped them in clean towels before they were transported again. As a student running his hut, he marked whoever he felt appropriate to send there. The Hungarian aid would then porter them into an ambulance to be taken to the human laundry in Camp II.
  On 14 May 1945, the 35 Casualty Clearing Station arrived and the remaining sick were moved to the German Military Hospital, later renamed the Glyn Hughes Hospital. It grew to accommodate 13 000 patients, and staff including the students, the British Red Cross and German medical staff.
  The work by the students was significant in reducing the death rate from initially more than 500 a day to fewer than 100 a day by mid-May. On 20 May 1945, Camp 1 was destroyed and the students moved to Camp 2.
caption: Belsen Concentration Camp. Human laundry[17]
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