The Nuremberg Trials

On the morning of 15 April 1945, Clara Greenbaum woke from an uneasy sleep to the realization that her recurring nightmare had no end. She was still incarcerated in the notorious Nazi slave labour camp at Belsen in northwestern Germany, where an estimated 100,000 prisoners, half of them Russian prisoners of war, had died since its inception in 1943. Clara and her two children – Hannah aged seven and Adam, who was not yet four – were just three of some 60,000 inmates who had miraculously survived starvation, summary execution and the typhus epidemic. Typhus alone had claimed the lives of up to 35,000 prisoners in the first few months of 1945. But no less of a hazard was the daily brutality meted out by the sadistic SS guards, who beat the prisoners unmercifully and frequently shot them at random for ‘target practice’.