Eyes that have seen the horrors of Belsen and changed a man forever

IT is the smell of Belsen, the sheer stink of rotting human flesh, disease and human excrement, that haunts Eddie Straight.

"I never got the smell off my chest for months," he says, his face contorting with disgust, "it would be with me when I went to bed, when I got up.

"When I think about war, what I think of is Belsen camp. How the hell could they do such things?"

Now a frail, gentle, smiling man, Mr Straight speaks quietly in his Saltburn care home clutching his cup of milk. It makes the transforming menacing anger which erupts from him is shocking. The young solider still present in an old man's body. "We caught up with a lot of the devils (the SS camp guards) and they laughed. They didn't laugh for bloody long...

"Before Belsen I thought I was sinning when I shot someone. After that I changed. Those bastards. What they did to the women as well. They had no mercy, shooting was too good for them." He bangs his lower stomach to show where some of the guards were shot by Mr Straight's comrades.

Mr Straight was a Company Sergeant Major in the 11th Armoured tank regiment, an elite regiment, when he was ordered to help liberate what he and his comrades thought was a prisoner-of-war camp near Hanover. What the British troops found there caused shock around the world. About 60,000 people were imprisoned in a camp built for 10,000 and there were about 13,000 rotting corpses.

By now the anger is replaced by sadness as Mr Straight describes what he found.

"It took your breath away. There were rows of Nissen huts filled with three-tier bunks. There were corpses in all of them. Some had been left for weeks, right next to the living. There was blood and excrement everywhere. You needed a gas mask to go in.

"I'd seen shooting but I had never seen anything like it. I didn't think people could do anything like that."

The typhus outbreak at Belsen had scared the German authorities and the German army negotiated a truce with the British to prevent the disease from spreading. British and Canadian troops found that most of the prisoners had not been fed or given water in days. Prisoners were dying at a rate of 500 a day.

Belsen was largely manned by Hungarian allies of the Germans who were forced to bury the vast numbers of dead probably fatally contracting typhus themselves. Only the Commandant, the 'beast of Belsen, Josef Kramer, was arrested at first and Mr Straight took his ceremonial sword from his private quarters. That sword is now in Middlesbrough's Dorman Museum.

The old soldier remembers the mass burial pit where he forced SS guards to bury the dead. "There were bodies, or what was left of them, but it was impossible to find their names. The names were all gone."

The British soldiers who witnessed the horrors at Belsen were changed forever

Mr Straight, who was born in Saltburn and went on to work for British Steel, has never publicly spoken of his incredible war stories before.

The railwayman's son was just 19 when he was put in charge of convicts from Dartmoor to help clear houses in the Blitz of London.

He was later a guard at Buckingham Palace and once "had to kick Princess Elizabeth up the backside" when he was assigned as a year body guard for a period.

The future queen had wanted watch the blitz bombing. "She remembered me years later at a garden party in the palace," he says, before adding that he had to escort her to a secret house in Scotland for evacuation.

After taking part in the invasion of Normandy and Germany he was later sent to Burma where he was in charge of 100 Nigerian troops before becoming seriously ill with malaria. The troops thought so highly of him that after the war they paid for Mr Straight and his late wife, Ina, to go to Lagos.

But, despite all he did and saw, it is Belsen that haunts Mr Straight. "I can never forget that place, the smell...I can never forget."

A 30 minute documentary by Saltburn film-maker, Craig Hornby, will be shown at the Dorman Museum in Middlesbrough tonight at 7pm. An associated display of images by award winning photographer Ian Forsyth and a major exhibit, the Belsen commandant’s presentation sword, will be exhibition from tomorrow until Sunday, June 28 at the museum.