This chapter analyses garments in the liberation of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945, where clothing was a vital matter. Lice-ridden garments spread typhus, claiming hundreds of lives after the camp passed from SS to British control. Medical students and humanitarian workers, from the Red Cross, Friends Relief Service and UNRRA, worked alongside military personnel and impressed German civilians and Hungarian guards to check disease and bring Holocaust survivors ‘back to life’. Clothing was crucial to the restoration of dignity. Many survivors were naked or partially clad; those with garments often had nothing to wear but camp uniforms or plundered SS apparel. Where would sufficient garments be found to stock ‘Harrods’, as Britons nicknamed Belsen’s clothing store? Initially, clothing, shoes and bedding were levied from the German population near Belsen in a British military effort to enact retributive justice that encountered considerable resistance. The chapter also explores relationships between survivors, medical students and relief workers, as clothing and makeup ‘refeminized’ women survivors, and as Britons wrestled with ambivalence towards Jews and Jewishness.

In 1914, occupation’ was a concept as alien as the gas mask, ration card, or aerial bomb. In the history of Europe various territories had been repeatedly occupied by enemy armies and, after the end of hostilities, had been either annexed or returned to the defeated state. The longest such episode began in 1878, when Austria-Hungary occupied Bosnia and Herzegovina. With the consent of the international community, this occupation was euphemistically referred to as an ‘administration’; it would last for thirty years. In 1908, the Habsburg monarchy annexed Sarajevo and adjacent areas, provoking a storm of protest. Lawyers had long struggled with the problem of how to define the responsibilities of an occupier (which had no legal right to the given territory under international law) towards the population of the territory it administered. War presented an additional problem: how decent could one realistically expect a state to be if the (largely hostile) occupied territory was situated close to its front lines?