A church volunteer, who was involved in the relief of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp at the end of the Second World War, has died two weeks before his 80th birthday.
Dennis Webb, of Hollywood Way, Woodford Green, died in Whipps Cross University Hospital last month.
His widow Joyce said: "His treatment in Acacia ward in Whipps Cross was absolutely fantastic.
"The nurses were very good. Everything was done that could be done." Mr Webb was treasurer of the Deanery of Waltham Forest for 40 years, a voluntary position which saw him carry out many parish audits.
He served in the Home Guard during the war before being called up in 1943.
After rising to the rank of sergeant in the Royal Corps of Signals, he took charge of the telephone exchange in Brunswick, Germany.
He was later sent to help with relief efforts at the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in Germany.
The camp was liberated by British troops in April 1945.
Mr Webb encountered the notorious Commandant Josef Kramer, known as the "Beast of Belsen".
Mr Webb later recalled: "If ever a man exuded evil, he did."
Kramer was eventually executed for war crimes.
Mrs Webb said that her husband found it very difficult to ignore the starving local people, who were so malnourished that giving them food would have killed them.
He and his colleagues saved up their chocolate ration for a Christmas party they organised for local children.
To say thank you, the children sang Silent Night (Stille Nacht) and, according to Mrs Webb, his eyes filled with tears whenever he heard the carol thereafter.
Jewish teenager Ann Frank died at Belsen aged 15 shortly before its liberation.
The diary of her time hiding with her family from the Nazis in occupied Holland, before their discovery and capture in 1944, is now a world-famous book.
Mr Webb was demobbed in 1947 and for the next 35 years he worked in the tax office in Stratford and later in Walthamstow.
He met his wife at All Saints Church in Highams Park and they married in June 1957. They had three children Fiona, 44, Ian, 38, and Andrew, 30. Speaking at Mr Webb's funeral, Canon Justin McKenzie, a churchwarden at St Catherine and St Paul Church in Leyton, said: "His concern was always that we show or practise a greater sense of mutuality between our parishes. He had a wonderful sense of the idiosyncratic, which was a joy to behold.
"None of this was ever malicious but he could not abide pomposity.
"All who knew him valued his trustworthiness and thereby respected his council and advice."
