Bergen-Belsen (or
Belsen) was a
Nazi concentration camp in
Lower Saxony in northwestern
Germany, southwest of the town of
Bergen near
Celle. Originally established as the
prisoner of war camp Stalag XI-C, in 1943 it became a concentration camp on the orders of
Heinrich Himmler, where
Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. Later still the name was applied to the
displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp it became as conditions deteriorated between 1943-1945. During this time an estimated 50,000
Russian prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there up to 35,000 of them dying of
typhus in the first few months of 1945.
The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the
British 11th Armoured Division. 60,000 prisoners were found inside, most of them seriously ill,and another 13,000 corpses lay around the camp unburied.The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the
BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
“
...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
"This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.
”
"I could not believe the horror of these camps," said one liberator. "We found piles of bodies in
train cars that had been dead for days."
