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authorities could not or would not deal with the risk of a typhus outbreak, they agreed to let British troops enter Belsen, even though they were still at war.
    Driving past piles of corpses and barracks stinking of excrement and rotting flesh, the soldiers could not quite believe what they were witnessing with their own eyes. Images from Belsen were among the first to be published in the Western press, and in Britain Belsen became the main symbol of Nazi mass murder. Brian Urquhart recalled that he had known about Nazi anti-Semitism: “Even so, the ‘final solution,’ the actual extermination of millions of people, was simply unimaginable. We were completely unprepared for Belsen.” 19 What neither he, nor the other British soldiers, realized was that Belsen was not even an extermination camp. Those camps were in Poland, and most had already been destroyed by the Germans before retreating to the west.
    Lieutenant Sington drove on, telling the survivors through a loudspeaker that they were free. Most were too far gone to respond in any way. Then he reached the main women’s camp, still holding his microphone:
    In a few seconds the car was surrounded by hundreds of women. They cried and wailed hysterically, uncontrollably, and no word from the loudspeakers could be heard. The compounds of the camp were planted with young birch trees and the women plucked leafy sprigs and small branches and hurled them on to the car. 20
    These women were among the lucky ones. They could still walk. A British medical student, who had volunteered to help, came across the following scene in one of the barracks:
    I was standing aghast in the midst of all this filth trying to get used to the smell which was a mixture of post-mortem room, a sewer, sweat, foul pus, when I heard a scrabbling on the floor. I looked down in the half light and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well populated and her ribs stood out as though there were nothing between them . . . She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor and, as she had diarrhoea, the liquid yellow stools bubbled over her thighs. 21
    The doctors and medical volunteers were desperate for more food, drugs, and medical equipment. They were faced with disease and famine on a scale they had never experienced, or even imagined was possible. Hundreds of people were still dying every day, sometimes from eating army rations that were too rich for their shrunken intestines. But the army is not always an efficient institution, and conditions in Germany were chaotic. One day in late April a mysterious consignment arrived containing large quantities of lipstick.
    It turned out to be a godsend. The commanding officer of a British ambulance unit, Lieutenant Colonel Gonin, remembers:
    I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet lips . . . At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity. 22
    Richard Wollheim, later to become a famous British philosopher, was an intelligence officer. Like Urquhart, he was sent briefly to Belsen, in May, when conditions were still terrible, but not quite as catastrophic as they had been. It had been decided somewhere in the army hierarchy that it would be a good idea to organize a dance party for the soldiers and the survivors at Belsen. Wollheim was told to organize the event. It was, alas, a disaster, for as the band of Hungarian camp guards (who had had a reputation for brutality), dressed up in national folk costumes, struck up a dance tune on their concertinas, there was a misunderstanding.