Yeah, I’d like to reiterate that the symptoms of refeeding syndrome normally set in after three to five days of feeding, not three to five minutes.
As panamajack says, this does not detract from eyewitness reports of people dying immediately after being fed. But it suggests that hypophosphatemia was not the cause of death.
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And don’t forget that just because the survives are magically cured of all other ailments just because they were liberated. I’d imagine it would be near impossible to accurately give statistics on those that died from overfeeding or from the malnourishment.
article on the liberation of Buchenwald:
Yeah I was totally refering to the VIDEO GAME not the world renown documentary :rolleyes:
The entire thing is youtube. But can’t seem to find the segment I am looking for.
I have heard such stories for a long time but never seen them substantiated. Didn’t Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five mention near-starving Allied prisoners who gorged after being freed, and then died? I think Yulsman in Elleander Morning told a similar tale.
I beleive there is passage in Stalingrad by Theodore Plievier where starving German troops come across a supply package and gorge themselves on jam, and are killed by colic.
It’s also in Band of Brothers, the soldiers are feeding the concentration camp victims they find, and are told to stop by a doctor (?). I don’t know if that was something that was added for dramatic purposes, or if it was something the soldiers who were there remembered happening.
Here is am account by nurse that specifically mentions that the surviours could not digest solid food. The account I remember definitely describes survivors dying due to refeeding rich, solid, food too soon.
There’s a part in Slaughterhouse 5 where the American prisoners arrive at the POW camp, nearly starving after a week in boxcars with little food, and are feted by the British prisoners who have been in German hands since Dunkirk. Through a snafu, the Brits are getting 10 times as many Red Cross packages as they should, and understandably neither they nor the Germans running the camp are inclined to fix the problem. So they stuff the Americans with food, who then have major & enormous intestinal problems later that day. Including the author. Don’t remember any of them dying though.
In Corrie Ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place she describes that she wanted to eat a lot on her release, but was told that it would have severe consequences. I recommend this book for everyone. Very inspirational. Ten Boom, her sister and her father were hiding Jews. Her sister and father paid with their lives, and if the war hadn’t ended when it did, she would have too. They were caught and put in concentration camps.
My grandmother told me how when they were liberated from Mauthausen, my grandfather made the family soup to eat. She said he wouldn’t let them eat solid food. He knew better, she said.
There is a convenient rule of thumb we use in the ED when confronted with extreme metabolic perturbations: If it happened quickly, correct it quickly. If it happened slowly, correct it slowly.
It’s not an ironclad rule and it’s just a rule of thumb (and it doesn’t apply to hyperkalemia with electrical changes, as an example) but in general it’s a good rule.
The body adjusts to chronic events with multiple mechanisms and feedback loops. You can’t just take an old lady with profound hyponatremia (low sodium) and give ‘er a big ol’ bolus of hypertonic saline. You’d kill her. On the other hand the same intervention might be lifesaving in a patient already seizing from acute hyponatremia.
Back to the concentration camps: the theory is that refeeding with high-calorie, high carbohydrate, high-protein etc meals in people starved to near death produces various metablic perturbations such as hypokalemia and hypophosphatemia and various electrolyte disturbances, and their secondary complications such as seizures and arrythmias which can be lethal. What would happen in a given patient is dependent on what exact perturbations have occurred in their particular system. These are discussed in any good article on re-feeding syndrome. I’m not enough of an expert historian to describe it’s prevalence post-holocaust victim rescue, but I have heard of it.
A specific example might be a patient with a profoundly low potassium from starvation. Now you give them a glucose load. Glucose stimulates release of insulin; perhaps a much greater release than normal because the pancreas has been just sitting there with no glucose load for a long time while the body eats its fat and protein stores. OK…glucose+insulin is how the body gets glucose into the cells to use it. Terrific. Except that insulin also activates the Na-K-ATP-ase pump and poofda: lowered potassium (and lowered phosphate) in the setting of already super low blood concentrations…say Goodnite, Gracie.
No cite sadly, but I remember something similar described in a documentary about the German army in Stalingrad. It specifically looked at why the Russians did so much better (gun oil mixed with something to stop it freezing, clothes designed to withstand the cold etc) and food stuffs were mentioned. IIRC, the Germans were shipped some sort of high energy fat mix, and after eating some of that, a lot of them just dropped dead.
Right. The Wikipedia reference isn’t even footnoted or cited, it just states that people died, with all the certainty Wikipedia statements are known for.
I am no holocaust denier by any means. I am a history buff though, and I’ve read way too much about the period, seen tons of footage (both archival and re-created), and have participated in most of the threads in this forum on war, WWII, historical topics, and the Holocaust since I’ve been here…and this is the first I’ve heard of this. So if it happened – and I’m not saying it didn’t – it’s not nearly as well-known as some posters seem to indicate, if 40 years of interest in the subject never brought it to my attention.
So I too think a couple of solid, specific historical citations would help establish this conversation more factually.
I apologize for taking so long to return to this thread.
Sailboat cited this this in response to
I’ve just spoken with Dr. Peter Black, Senior Historian at The Center for Advanced Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, in Washington DC. Black previously was Chief Historian of the Office of Special Investigations (the “Nazi Hunters”) in the Criminal Division of the Dept. of Justice.
He recommended that I consult Der Ort des Terrors : Geschichte der nationalsozialistischen Konzentrationslager / herausgegeben von Wolfgang Benz und Barbara Distel ; Redaktion, Angelika Königseder (Benz, Wolfgang; Distel, Barbara, eds. Angelica Koenigsberger, Redactor. The Place of Terror: History of Nazi Concentration Camps. 9 Vol. München:Beck, c200(3)5-2009.
According to Black, there is “uneven data” on a breakdown of survivors of the refeeding syndrome as compared to deaths caused by e.g., pneumonia, typhus, or simple death by exhaustion, and over what time frame. More importantly, the data would have to have been compiled by the U.S. Army medical services, which obviously had more pressing things to accomplish; the data from the camps liberated by the Soviets (e.g., Auschwitz) are even more haphazard. Never, as far as he knew, has anything ever been published on the question we’re discussing.
He recommended that I consult the Ort des Terrors volumes on each concentration camp (the work is specifically valuable, said Black, in that it is more or less up to date, of course, and the editors allowed the authors as much room as they thought was needed for each overview of a camp). Randomly flipping through his copy of the volumes, Black cited data that “105” people succumbed upon liberation by the US Army from Flossenbuerg (a fairly well-known US Army film was made there); at the Mauthausen camp, liberated by the US Army, “thousands were lost” post-liberation.
Were such a study of the medical records of each liberating army done (a project in itself, of course), suggested Black, a more accurate picture could be obtained. But the posters above are correct in there being no generalized hard evidence [yet?] on a more-or-less precise number of victims.
Thank you to all for taking part in this interesting and important thread.
Thank you for posting this. I have heard this story (don’t feed the starving people too quickly) for many years. I assumed it was based on sound medical knowledge and experience after the camps. It is excellent to know the truth.
Ignorance fought.
Thanks for doing the legwork, Leo Bloom. Good to know. And now… off to lunch!
It’s interesting that everything says refeeding syndrome was first described after WWII, but I have to wonder whether it’s not one of those common sense things that people have really known about forever.
When the Ostrogoths took Naples in 543, Totila ordered the city be locked down and rations be given out gradually so the starving inhabitants wouldn’t gorge themselves to death. While they didn’t know the science of it, they apparently knew the cause-and-effect.
Anyway, no reason for posting this as the original question seems to be answered as well as possible, just thought it was interesting.
IIRC they sent a Doctor to examine why seemingly healthy German soldiers were just dropping dead. He discovered that they had died of starvation; in the cold their bodies needed many more calories, but paradoxically the cold makes you feel less hungry and you eat less.
The high fat diet they were given helped, but several died of re-feeding syndrome.
And it was in the Caucasus Campaign, not in Stalingrad itself