Mark Hodkinson (2024) Opening the Gates of Hell. The untold story of Herbert Kenny, the man who discovered Belsen.

Eighty years ago, today, 27th January, Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz death camp. In the same week as one of a handful of the the richest men in the world, Elon Musk denied giving a Nazi Hitler salute of the inauguration of the 47th American President, we commemorate the Chinese Year of the Snake and the Holocaust.

Mark Hodkinson’s biography isn’t about world leaders, with their Jupiter-sized egos. His story is about an ordinary man, Herbert Kenny. His parents, like many other Irish migrants, were regarded as the lowest of the low. They settled in the middle of Manchester, literally, Middleton. Ordinary, working-class people whose central tenet was you just got on with it.   

At the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the average age a working man could hope to live to was 21. In 1845, Frederick Engels wrote about, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, much of it based on Manchester, where Kenny’s family settled. Most industrial cities, Little Irelands, including Glasgow, offered similar pictures of poverty.

‘A horde of ragged women and children swarm about here, as filthy as the swine that thrives upon the garbage heaps and in the puddles. The race that lives in those ruinous cottages or in the dark, wet cellars, in measureless filth and stench, most really have reached the lowest stage of humanity.’

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels understood that those that lived in poverty weren’t the lowest kind of humanity. That class belonged to those who lived in great wealth, who exploited the working poor. Concentration camps were capitalism in its purest forms. Workers were housed. Their wages was a watery bowl of turnip soup, which they fought and died over. Replaceable parts. With clothes, valuables and their gold teeth recycled. Their hair used on mattresses and their ashes as fertiliser. All of the work. None of the profits.

Hanna Levy-Hass, a prisoner in Belsen, kept a diary (1944-45) in which she wrote: ‘We have not died but we are dead.’    

  Lots of middle-class men, former soldiers, claim to have liberated Belsen. Herbert Kenny made not such claim. Working men don’t big themselves up in the same way officer-class need to. He just got on with it. But he never got over it.

He’d come up off the Normandy beaches. He’d seen death and dying. Men in bits. His job as an army dispatch rider gave him some autonomy. Often they scouted ahead and reported back to command their findings. The Germans were retreating but fighting a rear-guard action. A few days before he arrived in Celle, 8th April 1945, American bombers had hit a train with munitions. Prisoners in locked compartments also died. A few hundred escaped. They were hunted down and beaten to death by the SS police, Wehrmacht, the German Home Guard and Hitler Youth. Young and old, killing life unworthy of life.

Herbert and two other dispatch riders from the 35th Company took over a luxury home on the outskirts of Celle. Nearby was a factory with the mouth-watering smell of cakes and biscuits being baked. They reported back to their CO their findings.

Herbert found it amusing when he bumped into a Frenchman, a slave worker, pedalling the 350 miles towards France on a rickety bike, but spoke English with a Glaswegian accent. He told him about a concentration camp called Belsen. He helped draw a map to show were it was. The CO told Herbert to go and find out if what the Frenchman said was true. The camp was eleven miles away. Herbert carried a Sten submachine gun (with four magazines), a Luger (taken from a German) and a Mauser.

He left his motorcycle outside, debarred the gate and walked into hell. His CO and fellow soldiers waited outside. Skin and bone have become clichéd. On Sunday, 15th April 1945, the man that walked into Belsen was not the same man that walked out. Dead bodied and shit everywhere. It had become a dumping ground for other camps. 23 main camps. 900 subcamps. July 1944 to April 1945.  The number at Belsen multiplied from 7 300 to almost 90 000. The smell of Belsen got inside him. Sanitation was overwhelmed. Around 52 000 died of starvation, disease or were murdered by the guards in the fortnight before the British troops arrived. Bodies piles up. Some cannibalised. Most survivors were covered from head to toe in lice roamed the camp searching for food. The water supply had been cut off. Inmates drunk from a trough with a dead baby rotting inside it.

Lest we forget. Lest we give Nazi salutes. Lest we designate arbitrary others as untermensch. The Holocaust as fake news.

Migrants ‘need setting on fire’ or ‘blowing out of the water before they reach are [sic] shore’.     

Which of these are TikTok posts and which official government policy of the 45th and 47th American President and his billionaire acolytes? Discuss how ‘history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce’ (Karl Marx).  

‘In moving speech, Marian Turski (Holocaust survivor) warns that current conditions are similar to those which led to the Holocaust’.

Herbert Kenny was an ordinary working man who lived and died an ordinary life. There’s something extraordinary about that. Read on.

 

Comments

and the billionaire acolytes kiss'n the ring.... `get'n high on their own supply'... & history repeats its self for sure & in this day and age at a faster, speeder, clip and with more gravity in consequence... In the sense, what goes up, will come down, gravity & velocity with the pace of technology does not make for a graceful landing..... IMO...  there is a Marx type of revolution taking place... many times these revolutions and the seeds of purge are in places we cant see, or haven't looked for (yet)..... In any case Celt... Stark, real, interesting and again well done*

 

 

thanks for reading Kris. The more things change they remain more fucked up or something like that.