Indeed but at Bergen Belsen the deaths were not simply the
result of disease they were part of a deliberate policy. It
should be noted that over 14,000 British soldiers also
died of disease during the Boer war. There was appalling
negligence to be sure which affected Boer and British soldier alike
The result was an outcry in Britain and the dispatch of relief
supplies and the transfer of responsibility of running those
camps from the military to the civil authority. This reduced the
death rate to 2% which was typical for any large city of the era.
The Germans however deliberately herded people from camps
that were in danger of being overrun by the allies into Bergen Belsen
until it was grossly overcrowded. An overcrowded camp that had been designed
for
10,000 now had over 60,000 inmates added to its muster
Then just to make life even more dreadful as the British Army approached
they blew up the water supply to the camp while they lived comfortably
in the nearby army training camp. 35 thousand people died in the first few
months
of 1945. When the British Army arrived they found 13,000 unburied
corpses rotting in the camp and over 50,000 living people deprived
of food and water despite the stocks of food in the warehouses.
The death rate at that point was in the 9,000 a month and almost
15,000 more people died before the outbreak was under control
as those concerned were already emaciated
This was not unfortunately not a new problem at Bergen Belsen as by
the end of 1942 approx 41,000 Soviet POW's had died there.
Your apologia for the actions of the 3rd Reich is duly noted.
The German Naval buildup had NOTHING to do with the Boers beginning as
it did in 1898 with the First Fleet Act. As the Kaiser himself
wrote in his autobiography.
"I had a peculiar passion for the navy. It sprang to no small
extent from my English blood. When I was a little boy...
I admired the proud British ships. There awoke in me the
will to build ships of my own like these some day, and when
I was grown up to possess a fine navy as the English."
Keith