High-profile casualty to horrors of war

Ninety years ago, a West Country MP was the only woman to join a Parliamentary delegation sent to report on the atrocious conditions in German concentration camps. The experience may have been directly responsible for her death two years later. Eugene Byrne looks at the tragic experience of Mavis Tate.

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ON the afternoon of April 15 1945, British and Canadian troops liberated the German concentration camp at Bergen-Belsen. They found around 60,000 inmates still alive, though some of them barely so. There were also around 13,000 unburied bodies.

A few days before this, American forces had liberated another concentration camp at Buchenwald. Like Bergen-Belsen this was a labour camp, where people died of malnutrition, overwork, abuse by guards and of disease - typhus was rife in both when Allied troops turned up.

BBC radio broadcaster Richard Dimbleby later gave listeners at home a graphic description of what he had seen: "This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life," he said.

In the coming weeks, the Allied authorities were unable to save many of the men, women and children in the camps. Thousands more died.

Back at home, the radio, newsreels and newspapers were filled with horrifying accounts of what Allied troops were finding at camps as they advanced further into the ruins of Germany.

Churchill's government worried that Britons were becoming immune to the awful accounts and pictures, and decided to send a Parliamentary delegation to Germany to "tell the world the truth" about them.

While few doubted the truth of what thousands of servicemen had seen with their own eyes, or of what dozens of reporters, photographers and cameramen had seen, it was thought that the prestige and authority of eight MPs and two members of the House of Lords would press the facts home.

What effect the visit had on British public opinion is a matter of debate, but it had a profound effect on the Parliamentarians, and it may have led one local MP to take her own life.