Evelyn POLACEK KeRY

Leonard Berney saw the world through two remarkably different perspectives. As a young British soldier, he helped to alleviate the suffering of the survivors of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. As an old man, he boarded a luxury residential yacht and sailed around the world for seven years, enjoying the fruits of his labours. In between, he had made a lot of money.

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Berney was not the first British officer to enter Belsen but he was among the first to bring food, water and help to the starving inmates and begin the horrific task of disposing of the dead. He arrived in a truck carrying a loudspeaker to inform the prisoners — many too traumatised to understand their new situation — that they were now safe.

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On the previous day, April 12, 1945, a German colonel had been driven out to meet the leading elements of the British 8th Corps to inform them that typhus was rampant in the prison camp holding political prisoners a few kilometres ahead and proposed that both sides should avoid fighting in the area in case their troops became infected. This was agreed. Berney was with the relief column sent to liberate Belsen.

“None of us who entered the camp had any warning of what we were about to see,” Berney recalled later. On arriving, he found that one group of prisoners was rioting and attempting to plunder the camp food store. In response, on the orders of the SS commandant, Captain Joseph Kramer, the German guards were firing on them. Many hundreds of emaciated men and women prisoners were still behind barbed wire, living in long wooden huts with corpses littering the ground between them. In open areas to the rear of the huts were piles of corpses. Within the camp was a large open mass grave. “The sights, the stench, the sheer horror of the place, were indescribable,” Berney said 70 years later. Kramer — known as the “Beast of Belsen” — offered to give the relieving troops a tour. He expressed some surprise at their horror.

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Put in charge of the deployment of the water trucks, Berney rigged up standpipes from materials found in the camp stores so that the reeking prisoners could rinse themselves down. Later, he lamented that the food stores were thrown open. The starving inmates devoured rations for which their stomachs were unprepared, many of them dying as a result.

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Those able to walk or even stagger were moved to hastily improvised hospitals in nearby barracks left empty by the retreating enemy. Berney was made responsible for marking those thought to have a chance of survival with a cross on their heads. The troops and medical staff brought into the camp were sprayed with DDT every morning to kill the lice that were spreading the typhus. He remained at Belsen for four months until the camp was burnt down.

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After widespread publication of the atrocities, care packages began to arrive from abroad. In a subsequent interview, Berney remarked, “One of these was a crate of hundreds of lipsticks and I thought of all the things desperately needed, lipstick was not one.” He was mistaken. When the lipsticks were given out to women survivors the effect on their morale was extraordinary.

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Nanette König-Blitz, a Dutch Jew who now lives in Sao Paulo, Brazil, recalled how Berney wrote to her family to let them know she was alive. She says that he personally organised transport to take her back to the Netherlands. She had been in the same school class as the diarist Anne Frank, who died in Belsen.

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After the liberation, Berney — by this time a lieutenant-colonel — was made military governor of Schleswig-Holstein but was recalled in September 1945 to give evidence at the trial of Kramer and 43 SS guards. Kramer and nine others were sentenced to death.

Leonard Berney was born into a Jewish family in London, where both his parents ran a number of dress shops in the West End. The business prospered and Berney attended St Paul’s school with a view to studying at Cambridge. As war appeared inevitable in early 1939 he enlisted and was soon commissioned into the Royal Artillery and assigned to the defence of London. In 1944, he joined an anti-aircraft regiment with the 8th Corps of 21st Army.

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He married Patricia Purser at Plymouth Register Office in 1951 and they initially lived in an apartment above one of the Berney family’s factories. They later divorced but had three sons: the eldest, Steven, is in rock music management; Nicholas predeceased his father, and the youngest, John, works in social media management.

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A rather formal character, Berney lacked obvious warmth, while his wife was the opposite. She remarried. Her new husband, Ken Wood, founded the kitchen appliances business and helped her to bring up the boys.

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Berney became managing director of the Rembrandt clothing company in 1962. Years later, after selling the business, he moved to Spain, where he ran an unregulated investment scheme as a hobby. The business advertised potential returns of more than 40 per cent. Berney claimed he made it clear that it was high risk. Some did not heed the warning. Some were upset.

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When he left Spain in 2009, he bought an apartment on a luxury residential yacht, The World, which continuously circumnavigates the globe; it cost about £200,000 a year. “I miss nothing about living in a normal house,” he said. “Everything I want is right here.” He visited more than 700 ports worldwide and died from a heart attack on St Vincent.

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Towards the end, he wrote a biography, Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp, which he asked to be given to his grandchildren when he died. Prompted by the rise of Holocaust deniers, he was concerned that the memory of the camps would fade within two or three generations. “In the meantime,” he remarked, “I’m doing what I can to educate the young about what happened, and what can happen again.”

 

Leonard Berney, businessman, was born on April 11, 1920. He died on March 7, 2016, aged 95

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