Turning a corner in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the visitor suddenly hears a clipped British voice. It has a touch of the BBC, a slight lisp, and a faint Welsh accent. The voice comes from a short piece of black and white news footage and belongs to a man in round glasses, a military beret and coat - his hands thrust deep into the pockets - and a thick clerical collar. ‘I am the Reverend T. J. Stretch’, the person says, ‘attached as padre to the formation concerning this camp.’ Behind him there is a large hole in the ground. His speech continues:
"My home is at Fishguard, my parish was at Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth. I've been here eight days, and never in my life have I seen such damnable ghastliness. This morning we buried over five thousand bodies, we don't know who they are. Behind me, you can see a pit which will contain another five thousand. There are two others like it in preparation. All these deaths have been caused by systematic starvation and typhus and disease, which have been spread because of the treatment meted out to these poor people by their SS guards and their SS chief." (1)
The footage is of the former curate of Holy Trinity Church, Aberystwyth, interviewed just over a week following the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, in front of a mass grave that was still to be filled and over which he would soon say prayers for the dead.
Thomas James Stretch was born in Fishguard in 1915. Following graduation from Lampeter, he became curate at Holy Trinity in 1938 and was ordained a priest in St David’s Cathedral just before the outbreak of war in 1939. Over the next four years, Stretch led an active ministry in Aberystwyth. He was a regular preacher at Holy Trinity, conducted weddings and funerals, and served as chaplain to the local branch of Toc H, a charitable movement which had grown out of the work of an army chaplain in the First World War. Amongst his congregants were many mothers and children evacuated from Liverpool. (2) The Welsh Gazette reported that one of Stretch’s most important commitments as curate was his ‘active interest in the youth of the town’, being scoutmaster of the 1st Aberystwyth Scout Troop. (3 ) Most significantly for Stretch, it was in Aberystwyth that he met his wife, a locally based midwife. (4)
After four years in Aberystwyth, in December 1942 it was announced in the local press that their curate had enlisted as an army chaplain. The clergy was a reserved occupation, which meant that Stretch could not be "called up" into war service like the young men and women in his parish. He could have chosen to spend the war relatively peacefully, continuing his pastoral duties on the Home Front in Wales. But instead, at 27 years old, he volunteered to serve as an army chaplain. A chaplain, or padre, performed an important role in the army. His duties included conducting services for the troops. He would offer pastoral support to men even younger than himself, away from home probably for the first time, and facing fears and realities worse than anything for which their peacetime lives could have prepared them. A chaplain was also called upon to bury the dead.
Before he left for active service, on 2 April 1943, Holy Trinity formally said goodbye and presented Stretch with a communion set. (5) This was more than a simple leaving present from his former parishioners. A portable communion set would also be issued to Stretch by the Royal Army Chaplains Department, an essential part of a chaplain’s kit on active service. (6) It helped a chaplain to continue his ministry even as a unit was on the move during military operations, setting up temporary services and administering the sacraments to men in the most extreme circumstances. It was, in essence, the very mark of his duty as a chaplain, being a symbol of his pastoral care which would continue in Belsen and which began in Aberystwyth.
Stretch served in the UK for the first 18 months of his army chaplaincy. In June 1944, six days after D-Day, he embarked for France, moving with the army from there into Belgium and Holland and on into Germany (7). On 12 April 1945, a few weeks after the Allied crossing of the Rhine into north west Germany, commanders in the British and Canadian Second Army were approached by a German truce party. They were informed of a typhus epidemic in a nearby concentration camp. Three days later, the first British and Canadian troops entered Bergen-Belsen. T. J. Stretch was one of the first chaplains to arrive, putting him in a rare position to witness the relief of one of the first concentration camps liberated by the western Allies.
Belsen was a unique and complicated place in the Nazi concentration camp system.(8) The site between Bergen and Belsen originally accommodated a Germany army barracks and training ground. In 1941 it became a prisoner of war camp for Soviet troops captured on the Eastern Front, before evolving again into a so-called “exchange camp” for Jews whom the Nazis believed could be used for diplomatic barter. But as the Nazis’ mass murder of Jews intensified in 1944, more and more Jews were transported to Belsen. Over the winter of 1944-1945, as the eastern concentration camps were evacuated in the face of the advancing Soviet Army and surviving inmates force-marched west, Belsen became seriously overcrowded. In April the camp population reached a peak of over 60,000, numbers with which the camp infrastructure - what little there was - could not cope. Typhus and other diseases were rife and several thousand dead bodies lay unburied when the Allies entered the camp.
This situation became the immediate focus for T. J. Stretch and his fellow chaplains on their arrival. His interview gives a sense of the scale. That morning he had assisted in the burial of over 5,000 bodies and three other mass graves of similar size were in preparation. This was a state of affairs that was vastly removed from anything for which his curacy in Aberystwyth or his two years as an army chaplain could have prepared him. Army chaplaincy authorities stipulated the regulations by which a chaplain should conduct a soldier’s burial to ensure that every serviceman’s grave - as far as possible - was identifiable by his name and by the grave’s location. But this was impossible in Belsen where the sheer numbers of dead meant names were lost. As a result, funeral prayers were said at the sides of the mass graves by Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant chaplains. Though hastily prepared, these funerals were striking sights and gave an opportunity for chaplains of different faiths to speak words of comfort to one another. (9)
Over the coming days and weeks, chaplains’ tasks extended beyond the prayers and mass burials. As the dead were buried and the survivors were moved into the hastily established hospitals, chaplains like T. J. Stretch could spend less time with the mass dead who sadly remained anonymous and more time communicating with the living. In doing so he encountered survivors as individuals with their own names and stories.
As he wandered the camp, and met survivors, assessing what support they needed, Stretch wrote a three-page report about his experiences. (10) In it he described meeting the people ‘who had suffered so much’. He wondered aloud about who they were and expressed some of the things that survivors told him. He listed some of the ‘crimes’ which the survivors had apparently been interned for: listening to anti-Nazi broadcasts, speaking out ‘against the state or against Hitler’, or ‘underground workers in occupied countries’. Others, Stretch said, ‘belonged to different races and creeds; they were Poles or Jews - that was their only crime’.
Those who could speak English spoke to him, and he listened to them recount their stories of what they had suffered under the Nazis and their collaborators. One woman was Jewish and had spent six months in Belsen, another had spent two years imprisoned by the Nazis. They told him of their previous experiences in camps and he discerned that what he was witnessing of Belsen was only a snapshot of a much bigger picture of suffering, that even the thousands he had buried were but ‘a small portion of the great unknown number who have been systematically killed by the Nazis.’
As Stretch listened to stories, he also played a part in helping in the survivors’ rehabilitation. When he explained to some Czech girls that the liberators were trying to establish a hot water supply in the camp they apparently ‘could not believe it’.
These illustrations from Stretch’s report speak of just some of his experiences in Belsen. For Stretch, the ultimate purpose in writing this report was to tell the truth of what he had witnessed at Belsen. When he finished writing, he signed and dated the report ‘T. J. Stretch CF [Chaplain to the Forces], Belsen Camp, 22 April 1945’, his pen sealing the immediacy and authenticity of his account (11). His report was sent to the Church Times, in the pages of which Christian readers around the UK could read about Stretch’s experiences. (12) The significance of Stretch’s account is how - even in the first days after the camp’s liberation - in pastoral care a chaplain could encounter survivors, listen to some of their experiences and begin to recognise their Jewish identity, and write so that ‘the whole world should know about’ Belsen. (13)
It is not clear exactly how many weeks T. J. Stretch spent in the camp. However, on 15 May, a month after the liberation, Eyrl Hall Williams, a member of the Friends Relief Service also working in Belsen and a native of Barry, South Wales, reported in his diary meeting Revd David Stewart. Stewart was from Silian, Ceredigion. Stewart told Hall Williams that ‘there were several Welsh padres here’. (14) It is likely that one of those Welsh padres was T. J. Stretch. Even within the extreme work of the relief of Belsen, therefore, there was opportunity for these Welsh Christians to speak of home. Perhaps they also spoke of the shared faith that had brought them from their chapels and communities to Bergen-Belsen. This shared experience they brought home with them, because Stretch and his colleague chaplains were determined that others would know about Belsen.
Stretch returned to Wales, before beginning post-war ministry in Lancashire. He was Vicar of Poulton-Le-Fylde from 1954 and until his death in 1972. The experience at Belsen stayed with the former Aberystwyth curate for the rest of his life. As Stretch concluded in his report of Belsen, ‘All I have written about I have seen. And what I have seen, I shall never forget. Never.’
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| The Revd. Thomas James Stretch: Royal Army Chaplains’ Museum Collection |
Blog by Robert Thompson*
Notes
(1) United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, ‘British Army Chaplain Describes Bergen-Belsen Upon Liberation’ [1945], <https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/film/british-army-chaplain-describes-bergen-belsen-upon-liberation> [accessed 16 June 2022].
(2) Janet Jones, Holy Trinity Church Aberystwyth: The First One Hundred Years 1886-1986 (1986), p. 20.
(3) The British Newspaper Archive [BNA]. Welsh Gazette, 24 December 1942 [accessed 28 June 2022]
(4) Robert Thompson, correspondence with the daughter of T. J. Stretch.
(5) BNA. Welsh Gazette, 8 April 1943 [accessed 28 June 2022]
(6) Robert Thompson, correspondence with David Blake, curator, Museum of Army Chaplaincy, Shrivenham.
(7) Museum of Army Chaplaincy Archive, Shrivenham [MACA]. ‘Stretch, T. J.’ record card.
(8) For an introductory history to Belsen see: David Cesarani, ‘A Brief History of Bergen-Belsen’ in Eds. Suzanne Bardgett and David Cesarani, Belsen 1945: New Historical Perspectives (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 2006), pp. 13-21.
(9) Leslie H. Hardman and Cecily Goodman, The Survivors: The Story of the Belsen Remnant (London: Vallentine Mitchell, 1958), p. 24.
(10) Imperial War Museum, London [IWM]. Docs. 11561. ‘Private Papers of Reverend T.J Stretch CF’.
(11.) MACA. Revd T. J. Stretch, ‘Report on Belsen Camp’.
(12) The Church Times, 18 May 1945, p. 278.
(13) IWM. Docs. 11561. ‘Private Papers of Reverend T.J Stretch CF’.
(14) IWM. Docs. 2240. Private Papers of E Hall Williams. Diary, 15 May 1945.
*Robert Thompson is a Wolfson Foundation Postgraduate Scholar in the Humanities in the Hebrew and Jewish Studies Department, University College London. His research on Christian army chaplains at the liberation of Bergen-Belsen will be published in late 2022.
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