Ben Sheppard's account of the liberation of Belsen by British forces from April 1945 is an explicit effort to bring the now-contested history of that operation to the “general reader” (5). Sheppard attempts to plot a course through what he regards as the orthodox view, which celebrated the relief effort at Belsen, and what he terms the revisionist position—which identifies incompetence and mismanagement in the aftermath of the transfer of the camp into British hands as being, at least in part, responsible for thousands of unnecessary deaths. In many ways this book meets that challenge. It is a readable narrative that emphasizes a decision-making vacuum in the administration of the Belsen relief effort, especially in the crucial first two weeks that the camp was in British control. This lack of direction, in combination with unpreparedness for the, perhaps unprecedented, crisis that the camp represented, created a situation in which chaos reigned and lives were lost. Some of the medical policies adopted, particularly with regard to feeding the malnourished, were, Sheppard concludes, ultimately willfully negligent. But, Sheppard is also careful to point out that British servicemen, doctors, and nurses faced intolerable and impossible conditions at Belsen, and the individual heroism of both some of the liberators and the internees undoubtedly saved many lives too. In addition, Sheppard's book is a useful reminder that the story of the Holocaust and its victims did not end with liberation.

Despite the success and the clarity of the narrative Sheppard unfolds, this is also, however, a deeply problematic book. It raises many questions, for example, regarding the relationship between, for want of a better term, “popular history” and the academic historiography on which this work draws so heavily. First there is little that is new here. Sheppard himself acknowledges his debt to the Belsen scholars that preceded him. That debt is weighty indeed. Sheppard uses many of the same sources as others, to the extent that some of the most affecting and impressive excerpts from testimony have been employed before, for example in Joanne Reilly's fine study Belsen: The Liberation of a Concentration Camp (London, 1998). That the evidence Sheppard has uncovered has been unearthed before is only part of the problem with this book. That evidence has also been investigated with more nuance and complexity elsewhere.

Sheppard, for example, attacks Reilly's overly “critical” (83) approach to interpreting the role of women in the relief effort at Belsen whom she has memorably described as “cleaner, carer and occasional dance partner” ([Reilly, 1998], 44). Because these were roles adopted voluntarily and, at times, with enthusiasm, Sheppard contends that Reilly's observation that, despite its extreme circumstances, Belsen remained and reinforced a gendered world is invalid. This seems crass. Women's voluntarism in adopting gendered roles at Belsen was never in question, and that many of the women involved in the Belsen relief effort were relieved that they were spared some of the more horrific scenes in the camp is explicitly acknowledged in Reilly's book. And even if it were not, it is not clear at all why such voluntarism would invalidate a gender analysis of Belsen. Indeed, Sheppard's own work is replete with testimony suggesting that Belsen was almost a case study in the social construction of gender (120, 132). Many of the men involved in the relief effort were not able, for example, to regard women internees as women, despite that biological fact being evident in those internees' frequent nudity. When women's clothes, and indeed lipstick, were brought into the camp however, those women became rapidly feminized in the eyes of the liberators—and, for example, sexual relationships quickly developed between British relief workers and internees. It would seem uncontroversial to point out that this feminization occurred after the return of the recognizable social signifiers of gender. But this is a nuance that Sheppard denies the general reader.

Ironically, although Sheppard implies that others’ attempts to render the liberation of Belsen have been anachronistic, his own approach to the past is rather problematic. Throughout the book, in his effort to adjudicate between celebratory and revisionist histories of the liberation, Sheppard explicitly wishes to come to “judgments” about the liberation; indeed that is the title of the final chapter. This tendency toward judgment is even extended to the behavior of some of the internees, when the heroism of individuals is identified and implicitly praised (50). Such elevations of the model survivor are problematic precisely because they seem to constitute a moral evaluation of behavior. Sheppard implies that the survivors were free to “make themselves exceptional” (94). Such judgments have little empathy for the limited choices of a concentration camp environment either before or after liberation.

Sheppard's overwhelming desire to judge the relief effort leaves little time for explanation either. He wishes, for example, to stand aloof from the debates regarding the response of British state and society to the persecution and murder of Europe's Jews. These he seems to imply are a matter for historians, not for his objective narrative intended for popular consumption. But how is it possible to understand the liberation of Belsen outside of its context in this manner? The liberation, and especially the preconceptions with which the British entered the camp, were crucial in determining the history of the relief effort itself. How can we explain the lack of priority given to that relief effort, which as Sheppard points out was deprived both of senior decision makers and resources, without being cognizant of the British government’s, perhaps willful, misunderstanding of the privations of Jews in Nazi hands?

The answer, of course, is that we cannot. As such, the general reader, who Sheppard's readable narrative is designed to serve, is actually done a disservice by the claim that complexity can be eschewed in the name of narrative, of getting the story straight. History is a matter of nuance and complexity, and there seems no reason why this cannot be communicated to a wider reading public.