The Barts Nurse who Helped Liberate Belsen

Sister Elizabeth Biggs was a Barts nurse and one of the first nursing staff to help with the liberation of Bergen Belsen concentration camp in April 1945.

In early April 1945, Allied troops entered Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp and found horrific scenes. Many Jewish people, Gypsy and Roma, and other people determined undesirable by the Nazi Party were imprisoned in appalling conditions. Belsen began life as a labour camp, but as Russian troops advanced into Eastern Europe in late 1944, thousands of prisoners were transported to Belsen, resulting in an overcrowded camp where thousands died daily from malnutrition, typhus, and dysentery. The diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot were among the victims, having been evacuated from Auschwitz. On 15th April 1945, the British Army liberated Belsen, finding 60,000 starving and seriously ill people. Urgent help was needed.

Enter the London Teaching Hospital’s Medical Students

A few weeks before the liberation of Belsen, the War Office wrote to all the Deans of the London Medical Schools requesting help for the Netherlands, which was experiencing a severe famine. Ninety-seven final-year medical students, including from Barts, stepped forward to help. They were given typhus vaccines and were about to fly to Holland when they were asked to divert to Germany to support the relief effort at Belsen. On arrival, their job was to triage and help set up services to treat typhus and malnutrition. For medical students about to graduate, it was a harrowing experience, and some experienced post-traumatic problems as a result. Two students caught typhus. You can listen to the memories of Barts student Andrew Dossetor in this recording on the Imperial War Museum website here. One of the chaplains assigned to Belsen, Reverend Father V. M. Fay wrote:

“The best job of work, in my opinion, is being done by 100 medical students who are caring for the inmates in huts.”

The Nurses Arrive

Sister Elizabeth Biggs trained as a nurse at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, qualifying in 1933. She then worked at the Women’s Hospital in Soho Square and, in 1939, at the Isolation Hospital in Romford. Private papers at the Imperial War Museum include a personal note from Queen Mary, wishing Elizabeth well.

During the war, Sister Biggs nursed injured troops with No 9 British Field Hospital. In 1939, the hospital was stationed in Le Mans before moving south of Paris prior to the Dunkirk evacuation. For most of the war, the field hospital was located in England, but the team was deployed to Bayeux just after the D Day Landings in June 1944. In April 1945, Elizabeth Biggs was sent to support the liberation of Belsen. In a letter to a friend, she wrote from the No 9 British Field Hospital:

“Where do you think I have landed? Belsen Camp of all places, and my God, what a place it is. I have never seen anything so ghastly in all my life.”

Elizabeth Biggs was immersed in desperate attempts to save people from starvation and infectious diseases. The camp hospital had been organized in what was the SS barracks. Biggs reported 28,000 patients needing attention. The hospital was set out in squares with four huts. Each hut housed 150 patients. There was one medical officer per square and a sister in charge. Other sisters worked in the huts with orderlies and students. A team of Hungarians was responsible for the cleaning. Nurses typically worked from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. The nurses were accommodated in army tents, which almost blew away several times in the atrocious weather.

Sister Biggs described the “Human Laundry” used to delouse and clean the ex-prisoners. Formed like a modern decontamination unit but with much less sophistication, the human laundry was dehumanising but a critical part of the relief effort.

Elizabeth Biggs also outlined how inmates continued to hoard food even though they now received two meals a day. Habits of desperation were hard to eradicate. She also observed how people had lost the power to swallow, having been starved for so long. Although the nurses made huge efforts to feed people, they simply dribbled food from their mouths. Many had no clothes, and Elizabeth Biggs detailed how each local German was ordered to donate a full set of clothing. Once people were fit to leave, they were sent home across Europe, if they had homes left. Many of the Belsen inmates found that their entire families had been killed in the Holocaust, and they had nowhere to go. 

Hill End

After the war, Sister Biggs nursed at Hill End Hospital in St Albans, where she was known to the nurses as “Biggie.” Barts used Hill End during World War II as patients were evacuated out of London. It was at Hill End where a young student nurse, Carol Bavin, remembers Miss Biggs:

“I belted on her ward in 1958. She retired in 1959. To say that she was unconventional is an understatement. Many of us can tell stories about her, but her patients got better. If you were slow in doing something, she would say- you are holding up the troops.”

As the 80th anniversary of the Liberation of Belsen approaches, it’s worth reflecting on the closing lines of Elizabeth Biggs’ letter:

“What a life. However, it is an experience I would not have missed for worlds, but I shall be glad when it is over.”

Sources:

Private Papers of Sister E E Biggs. Imperial War Museum. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030018736

Private papers of Reverend V M Fay. Imperial War Museum. https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/1030022087

Scarlet Finders. Location of British Field Hospitals in the Second World War. http://www.scarletfinders.co.uk/112.html

Author:  Rachael Rowe

Copyright: Barts League of Nurses