The North Yorkshire GP who helped liberate a concentration camp
As those at home prepared to celebrate the victory, a man who would become a pioneering North Yorkshire GP was on his way to attend to the aftermath of the defeat of the Nazis. Dr Kenneth Easton arrived at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany in the first days of May exactly 80 years ago. "It was like going to hell and back," he told me in 1995 in his home in Catterick Village, a community beside the A1 which he had served since 1950. 
Already at the camp was Sapper Frank Chapman who in later life would run an ice cream shop in Hawes. He was in 619 Field Park Company of the Royal Engineers, and he was a bulldozer driver. Belsen was a 'erholungslager', or recovery camp, where people too ill to work in other camps were sent to get better.
Or to die. Most died. Of malnutrition, starvation, dysentery, typhus.
In the first three months of 1945, until the camp's liberation by British forces on April 15, it is estimated that 35,000 people passed away in Belsen. 
Dr Easton, only 21 and one of 97 trainee medics sent out from London teaching hospitals, was put in charge of two stinking huts filled with hundreds of patients. They lay barely alive, three skeletons in a bunk meant for one, with their excreta dribbling down onto the wretches below. As he squeezed in the darkness through these tiers of broken bodies, bony arms groped out at him, and feeble voices pitifully moaned "kranke, kranke" ("ill, ill" in German), imploring him to help.
Outside, in the bright sun of the early European summer, there were piles of naked, emaciated corpses - when the British arrived they estimated they found 60,000 prisoners and 13,000 bodies. Newsreel footage from Belsen shocked Britain when it was screened in cinemas 80 years ago, sobering up the victory celebrations. 
Five minutes of it survive, showing Spr Chapman at the wheel of his bulldozer holding a white handkerchief over his face as he ploughed, time and again, through the piles of dead humans. He referred to the piles as "like a muckheap, the bodies lined up head to tail. The heap was 100 yards long and six feet high.
Men, women and children". In the footage the bodies roll in front of his machine, their limbs bucking and rearing and breaking as they rise into a tidal wave of ex-humanity which floods down into a giant pit. In his two months at Belsen, Spr Chapman estimated he heaved about 23,000 bodies into their last resting place.
One of those communal pits contains the remains of Anne Frank, 15, who had kept a diary recording her life under the Nazis. And her sister, Margot, 19. Spr Cooper remembered how in Belsen there were four inches of dust of dried faeces, human remains and germs, so he was allowed to drive no faster than five miles an hour for fear of churning it all up into a choking cloud.
Dr Easton agreed: "No one watching the films can conceive the actuality. It was indescribable. You could smell the stench from miles away, from Celle airport 12 miles away if the wind was in the right direction."
Dr Easton was born in Surrey in 1924 and was nearing the end of his studies at Kings College London when he volunteered for duty on the continent. He'd seen the newsreel footage of the unfolding evidence of the atrocities - on April 19, as the picture began to emerge, Winston Churchill said: "No words can express our horror" - but the young medics were excited that they were going to be playing a part in rebuilding Europe. Dr Easton remembered being driven through German forests that looked really pretty with the sun filtering through the vivid green of the new spring leaves, but then the lanes became lined with white flags and notices: 'Danger Typhus'.
Some of them were so desperate that they were reduced to eating the fallen wreckage of those people who had failed to find anything. "We called them 'muselmanner' - people in a hopeless trance," he said. Muselmanner was a German word for those who were in such an advanced state of starvation and desperation that they were on the verge of death, yet something inside them compelled them to keep moving, to keep searching even though they knew there was no hope.
"They were just walking skin and bones, their eyes sunk to the back of their heads," said Spr Chapman. "They were just so weak they would walk along and drop down dead," said Dr Easton. "Sometimes their corpses liquefied, and we might inadvertently step into a body - our army issue boots were rotted through by the end of the month." Said Spr Chapman: "When you walked through the camp at night it was eery.
The bodies moaned at you." There were about 200 huts in Belsen and each trainee doctor was put in charge of two, tasked with cleaning, feeding and treating as best they could. "We looked after 500 each," said Dr Easton. "My number two went down with typhus very quickly so I had 1,000."
Inside, the inmates had shut off those people sent mad by typhus, and they wouldn't give them any food." Dr Easton himself scrubbed the room clean in a fit of rage. "One of the worst moments was when I was near the Ziguener tent, the gypsy tent," he said. "There was a pile of bodies under the tentage and a little boy, about six or seven, came up to me.
He said his mother had just died and could I help him." All he could do was take the boy to another group of women and ask them to look after the poor little orphan. Yet amid this desolation, someone had pinned to a hut wall a beautiful card of bright yellow daffodils. 'Herzliche ostergnissen' it said.
Happy Easter. On his daily rounds of the tents and huts, he would scrub and clean up, separate the living from the dead and try to care for the survivors - "they were terrified of syringes because they were instruments of death", he said. He was helped by a Jewish girl from Hungary, aged about 21, whom he knew simply as Eva.
"She was a survivor. Gaunt, freckled and wearing a skirt and top which she had made from a German soldier's waterproof," he said. "Her family had been decimated - her father died just before the camp was liberated." From Eva he learned about conditions under the Germans, about the 5am wake-up call where the internees were forced to stand in lines for hours. Those who couldn't stand fell and were then beaten for their weakness until they were dead.
The Germans tried to dispose of the bodies, either through burying them or burning them in an oven which Spr Chapman remembered had been at the far end of the camp. It was big enough to cremate 12 bodies at a time, although in the weeks leading up to liberation, the Germans had been putting in the almost-dead - the living - as well. Beside it were vast, grotesque piles of incombustibles: shoes, spectacles, false teeth.
Spr Chapman made a whipping motion to show how these had been removed and flung aside before the bodies had been thrown in. And there was human hair. "All their heads were shaved and the hair was in bags sticking out all over," he said. "There must have been two or three tons of it." The Germans were going to weave it into clothing.
He remembered how, in complete contrast to the carnage inside the camp, on the outside of the barbed wire perimeter fence, the Germans had nailed nesting boxes for birds to the trees. 
The death toll fell from 500 a day when they arrived to 100 a day, sometimes just 50 a day, by the end of the month. "It was my job to choose clothes for 500 women - knickers, stockings, shoes, blouses from stores that had been liberated," he said, and for the first time in more than an hour, he almost smiled. "You know, I can never please women, but I got them some lipstick and tried to make them feel like women." There were happier times, such as when he heard the recuperating women strolling arm in arm in the woods singing their traditional songs.
"Once my ladies were able to invite me to their hut for 'tea'," he said. "On a free-standing stove, very hot, they had made potato pancakes with their dirty hands. It was very moving." But then his face changed.
He had spent the best part of the intervening 50 years looking unsuccessfully for Eva as they were suddenly separated and he hadn't even taken note of the camp number tattooed on her arm. Even 50 years on, the memories of what he had witnessed in May 1945 reduced him to tears as he relived them. Neither he nor Spr Chapman had had any counselling for what they had seen.
Spr Chapman was demobbed and returned to Hawes where he married and went into ice creams. He died in 2003, still troubled by nightmares, just as Dr Easton was. The GP said: "In my dreams I have throttled Germans for their deeds.
Once I throttled my wife, Janet, during such a dream, and we slept with a protective mallet between us for a long time." After Belsen he completed his final exams then did his national service with the RAF at Catterick[1]. That finished in 1950 and he settled with Janet in the village.
They had five children. Being close to the A1, he was regularly called to treat the victims of motor accidents. One in 1965 he saw two people trapped in a lorry bleed to death as they waited for more than an hour for rescue equipment to arrive.
Dr Easton believed they had stood a chance had they received medical treatment immediately, so he began campaigning for the first responders to get medical training and he organised 34 GPs based near the A1 onto a rota to be called to the scene of an accident to deliver treatment. Recommended reading: He received an OBE in 1974 for his work in making the motorway safer, and when he died in 2001 he was hailed as 'the creator of the paramedic service'.
He also believed that, based on his experiences in Belsen, history should provide a warning to the future about the dangers of extremism. "That's why we must testify," he said in 1995. "Man's inhumanity to man is indescribable. Beware!
Beware!
Beware!"