Let's take the case of Bergen-Belsen. Any reasonable assessment of the end days of Bergen-Belsen has to proceed from the basic fact of the catastrophic conditions in the camp that developed when its mission changed to collection/reception site
in late 1944. Omitting this history, and the condition of the camp when the Allies liberated it, is tendentious.
The disaster in the camp - which came primarily as a result of factors under the Nazis’ control (a nearly mad and certainly chaotic effort to make inmates from the East available for labor, Himmler’s “outreach” to the Allies for which he wanted to use KL prisoners as bargaining chips, the Germans’ refusal to understand they’d lost the war and thus their descent into sheer destructive warfare, impact of longstanding brutalization and disregard for prisoners and targeted population groups, insane overcrowding in western camps as inmates were collected at various sites, etc - all in the context of a delusional military strategy) - was so anarchic that Kramer appealed for Glucks’ support in bringing the situation under control.
At the time, a typhus epidemic - which had begun in February 1945 and which was caused by the ruinous conditions in the camp and exacerbated by the primitive, at best, medical care provided by the Germans - was raging, making evacuation of prisoners en masse from Bergen-Belsen impossible. Allied bombing strikes hit water lines to the camp (IIRC in March) - and the water supply was still a major need when the British took over the camp. With the German-imposed disaster that was B-B by this time, the shocks of the war were nearly impossible for those running B-B to address.
In July 1944 the various sub-camps at Bergen-Belsen had held about 7,500 prisoners. The infrastructure wasn't in place, despite expansion of Bergen-Belsen during 1944, to accommodate and support many times this number of inmates. Yet, the war which Nazis launched was not by 1944, we might say, working out for Germany. As Germany lost territory, one reaction was to move inmates westward from camps in danger of falling to the Red Army. One of the places to which inmates were brought, starting in mid-1944, was Bergen-Belsen. According to
this article at Gedenkstätte Bergen-Belsen,
This complex situation, and particularly the changing role of Bergen-Belsen as the end of the war approached, would be the appropriate context for the disasters that befell the camp.
An early indicator of the camp’s changing purposes and conditions came in March 1944, when, with a transport of 1,000 very ill inmates from the slave-labor camps at Dora-Mittelbau the Nazis began offloading sick prisoners unable to work to Bergen-Belsen, supposedly for treatment, although no relevant medical facilities were available at Bergen-Belsen; in summer 1944, 200 of these transferees would be put to death with phenol injections (USHMM Encyclopedia of Camps and Ghettos, Vol 1/Part A, p 279). During that same summer, a tent was built to “house” female prisoners brought to Bergen-Belsen from Poland for armaments work; in the fall, the tent was destroyed in a storm and the female prisoners – by then numbering 8,000 – were squeezed into existing barracks. In the fall, with evacuation from the East by then a major effort, Bergen-Belsen saw yet another change in its role as the camp was pressed into service as a “destination for . . . evacuation transports”; thus, the camp was expanded in January 1945. According to the USHMM Encyclopedia (p 280), the changes brought a logistical and administrative nightmare, overwhelmed systems, and lethal chaos in the camp: It was at this point that Kramer became commandant (p 280):
In fact,
reported death tolls for this period indicate a rapid rise in mortality correlating to the increased camp population, not to Allied control of the camp and not to bombing or other military operations; Allied control of the camp wasn't achieved until 15 April 1945, by which time the camp's population was 55,000 - over 5x what it had been just 9 months before. Bergen-Belsen held “only” 41,250 prisoners on 1 March 1945 – 20,000 fewer than its population at liberation but 5.5x its July 1944 population (USHMM Encyclopedia, p 280). Death tolls shot up as the camp's population increased, with Bergen-Belsen's mission changing to collection point and with systems and order in the camp breaking down as a result:
Deaths in all of 1943-1944: 3,100
Deaths in January 1945: around 1,200
Deaths in February 1945: around 6,400 (typhus epidemic)
Deaths in March 1945: at least 18,168
Deaths in April 1945: around 10,000
The worst of these outcomes precede by months the camp's liberation and stem mostly from self-imposed problems created by the German war effort, Germany’s inglorious and ruinous defeat, the network of camps created by the SS in particular, and the SS decision to crowd prisoners as though they were goods for labor or bargaining chits or pieces of incriminating evidence into a diminishing territory and number of camps. In addition, food was not the sole crisis in the camp; Belsen, overwhelmed by incoming inmates, already saw a typhus epidemic - in February 1945, when the monthly death toll jumped from 1,200 to over 6,000. This snapshot is indicative of what was happening in Belsen in 1945 leading up to the camp's liberation.
In his book on the death marches, Daniel Blatman details how Belsen commandant Kramer appealed to Glucks of the WVHA for support in doing something about the conditions in the camp - when it was too late, when the self-imposed problems of Reich KL and labor policy had imploded, in March 1945, again prior to the Allied liberation of B-B - as the camp was in uncontrolled meltdown; Kramer wrote (p 133):
Kramer was protesting, in essence, that he'd signed up for murderous exploitation of prisoners - not for complete, rampant anarchy. His plea to Glucks sounds so much like what you deniers call Greuelpropaganda that no further comment is needed except this: note that Kramer warned Glucks that prisoner deaths "will still further increase in view of the conditions which at present prevail"; this development is precisely what happened following liberation - deaths continued and increased despite emergency, medical efforts on the part of the Allies.
As Kramer predicted, the increased mortality of March-April 1945 was an inevitable result of the conditions that the Nazis had created at B-B by late winter 1945 - it had nothing to do with the Allied victory and takeover of camps, Allied bombing, etc.
At the time of Kramer's appeal to Glucks, with the war lost for Germany and no way out, the Reich's leadership was basically lost on what to do - and orders/guidelines across the camp system and Reich were in as much chaos as was B-B itself. On the one hand, the time-honored approach was to kill off prisoners via work and to get rid of the unfit among the inmates; at the same time, Himmler now wanted masses of prisoners to figure in his attempts to bargain with the allies - so to some extent Kramer’s warnings were an alert to Himmler. Himmler’s response showed the confusion into which the RFSS himself had fallen: on 19 March 1945 he had Pohl (does you even know who Pohl was?) visit the camp. Pohl, a somewhat hardened individual, one might say, was appalled; still, he denied Kramer’s request to stop sending in prisoners from around the KL system so that overcrowding might be somewhat alleviated. In short, chaos and high mortality would be encouraged from the very top - sending in more prisoners was a guaranteed death sentence for 1000s. Indeed, as noted, on 10 April a transport of 15,000 men from the “miracle weapons” factories at Dora was brought in - so bad was the crowding in B-B that these men had to be “housed” at the nearby Panzer training school, mentioned by Nessie in a different context.
Pohl, however, did make a change in course. One purpose of B-B, long before its role-shift in late 1944 to terminus camp, was to house “exchange Jews” whom Himmler hoped to trade to the Allies for German internees or hard currency. Nursing hopes of a grand and final stand, supported by V-2 rockets and hostage Jews, even while bargaining for peace with western Allies, Himmler had Pohl remove about 7,000 “exchange Jews” from B-B. Clearly, allowing these poker chips to languish and disintegrate in his hell-house at B-B would ruin their value - so the RFSS, chasing chimeras and approaching the apocalypse, intended to get his "exchange Jews" somewhere safer than B-B - namely, Theresienstadt.
Pohl and Kramer ordered the 7,000 Jews disinfected and had them loaded onto three trains in early April. Due to Allied bombing and the course of the war, the trains were constantly re-routed, forced to make detours, etc - and before reaching their destination were intercepted by Allied forces.
During these weeks, the Third Reich government was comprehensively dysfunctional, with factions, like Himmler’s, working at odds with one another; Himmler himself was working behind the Führer’s back to save, he hoped, his own neck with the Allies. It appears that Hitler, equally as unrealistic as Himmler, wanted to prevent camp inmates from falling into the hands of the Allied armies and was willing to slaughter them before the enemy got to them. Himmler’s goals, which included the far-fetched idea of an agreement with the western Allies against the Soviets, to be fed by deals for Jews and the like, worked in a contrary direction: showing himself suddenly responsible, Himmler now sought to keep inmates in the KL system alive. Thus, by April Himmler had appointed Kurt Becher (who in 1944 had worked on deals that brought Kastner Jews to B-B) his special commissar for Jewish and political prisoners.
But the Reich's position, and Himmler's room for maneuver - from the military situation to the situation in the camps - had gone to hell by April 1945. Still, in his new capacity Becher visited B-B on 10 April. Kramer convinced him that the situation in B-B was hopeless - typhus remained epidemic, food was in short supply, water was scarcely available, medical care was impossible - and 100s of prisoners were dying each day. Basically, Becher threw in the proverbial towel, as he and Kramer decided to surrender B-B forthwith.
Neither Allied food policy at liberation (nor Allied bombing, another famous denier canard) is a central driver of these events. What happened at B-B was grotesque beyond even these appalling calamities. Arguing that the special conditions of B-B were somehow brought about by the Allies is disingenuous or ignorant. Or another vapid apology for the continent-wide devastation brought about by the Nazi heroes of revisionism.