Present-day entrance to Bergen-Belsen

It was started in 1940 as a POW camp. Until spring 1942, about 18,000 Soviet soldiers had died of hunger, cold and disease. Later (1942) Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp; the SS took the command in April 1943. In March 1944 the camp was redesignated as an "Ehrholungslager", or "Recovery Camp", [1] where prisoners of other camps too sick to work were brought. There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, since the mass executions took place in the camps further east; nevertheless thousands of Jews, Czechs, Poles, anti-Nazi Christians, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti died in the camp. Eventually, thirty-four female guards served at Bergen-Belsen, many of them escaping as the British neared. Prisoners recounted after the war that they saw SS men and women burning papers and fleeing the camp days before the troops arrived. The SS who stayed, however, wore white armbands.

In 1945 the prisoners of other camps were brought to the front lines, since these camps were liberated by the Soviets. In overcrowded conditions disease and malnutrition caused many deaths. Mass graves were dug. When the British liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they found thousands of bodies unburied. Bergen-Belsen was burned to the ground following the liberation because of the infestation of epidemic typhus and lice.

Mass grave at Bergen Belsen concentration camp 1945

Many of the former SS staff that survived the typhus epidemic were tried by the British at the Belsen Trial. One defendant, Klara Opitz, lost all of her hair from the disease. At the trial, the world got its first view of Irma Grese, Elizabeth Volkenrath, Juana Bormann, Fritz Klein , Josef Kramer and the rest of the SS men and SS women who before served at Mittelbau Dora, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz I, II, III, and Neuengamme. Many of the female guards in fact served at tiny Gross Rosen subcamps at Neusalz, Langenleuba, and the Dora Mittelbau (Mittelbau Dora) subcamp at Gross Werther.

Bergen Belsen as it was

At least 50,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen before liberation, among them Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who died there in March 1945. An estimated 13,000 more died of illness and malnutrition shortly after liberation. Although the camp itself was burned to the ground, the site is today open to the public, featuring a visitors' centre, a monument to the dead, [2] and a "House of Silence" for reflection.

References

• Bergen-Belsen Memorial
• The United States' Holocaust Memorial website on Belsen
• A lengthy account of the site and its liberation

External Links

• BBC Journalist Richard Dimbleby's original Radio Report from April 15.
• Belsen 60 years on, BBC.
• Belsen 60 years on, Daily Telegraph