Warning: The following blog post contains graphic information regarding what Dr. Sydenstricker witnessed at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.
The Augusta University Libraries Holocaust series held its first lecture on Tuesday, Sept. 10 about Dr. Virgil Sydenstricker and his role in reintroducing malnourished Holocaust survivors to food.
Sydenstricker, who was a Professor of Medicine at the Medical College of Georgia, played a significant role in implementing a plan that saved numerous lives at Germany’s Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp, following liberation by the United Kingdom and Canada in 1945.
Dr. Robert Nesbit, Emeritus Faculty at MCG, gave the hour-long presentation at the Historical Archives and Collections at Greenblatt Library. Nesbit said before Sydenstricker’s work in World War II, he had helped at the Johns Hopkins Base Hospital in Paris during the First World War and had been a leading scholar on Pellagra Disease in the 1920s and 30s.
“Sydenstricker was internationally recognized,” Nesbit said, referring to his expertise on nutrition and diseases surrounding malnutrition.
Before visiting the Concentration Camps, Sydenstricker was primarily in the United Kingdom, France and Netherlands studying the effects of rations on their populations and what role it played in malnutrition. During his time in London, where he was seeing as many as 100 patients a day, Sydenstrickter noted that “Malnutrition as we (Americans) know it doesn’t exist here.”
Belsen started as a Nazi-run Prisoner of War camp and transitioned to a Concentration Camp in 1943 when it was transferred to the Schutzstaffel. Anne Frank died at the Concentration Camp, prior to liberation. Approximately 60,000 people were in the camp upon liberation, and the grounds were under a severe Typhus outbreak.
Doctors quickly realized that providing a normal diet to the malnourished immediately led to these people dying fast, which now is understood to be due to metabolic and electrolytic changes. Sydenstricker started the survivors on a small diet of concentrated dried milk. Eventually, he would then reintroduce eggs, bread and soup to their diets, leading to an increase in survival rates.
In letters Sydenstricker penned to his wife and published in the Augusta Chronicle, he called the environment a cesspool and stated the conditions in the camps were worse than what was being reported.
“The camp defies whatever you might read about it or see in pictures — it will be totally inadequate,” he wrote. “Imagine 40,000 people — men, women and children — crowded into a space one by two kilometers.”
In that letter, he also mentioned that some in the camp couldn’t even handle eating gruel, a type of cereal or rice heated in water or milk. Once everyone had left the camp, it was burned down to prevent the continued spread of Typhus.
Upon leaving Belsen, Sydenstricker continued to monitor people affected by the war in Western Holland before returning to MCG. He remained on the MCG faculty until 1957 and remained an emeritus until his passing in 1964.
The next installation of the AU Libraries Holocaust Lecture Series will be at 4 p.m. on Thursday, Nov. 14. A panel consisting of Dr. David Bulla, Dr. Hubert Van Tuyll, Dr. James Garvey and Profesor Stacey Thompson will discuss how newspapers reported the Holocaust, how museums represent the Holocaust and the experiences of local veterans who liberated concentration camps. The panel is titled “American Soldiers during the Holocaust: Perception and Representation in Newspapers and Museums,” and will take place in the Reese Room at Reese Library.
The AU Libraries Holocaust Lecture Series is supported by Georgia Humanities, in partnership with the Georgia Department of Economic Development, through funding from the Georgia General Assembly.
Georgia Humanities provided $1,499 for AU Libraries to host the series, which is also done in partnership with the Augusta Jewish Museum.
For more information, visit: http://www.augusta.edu/library/.
