The liberation of Bergen-Belsen

On the afternoon of Sunday 15 April 1945 soldiers of the British Second Army entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Lower Saxony, a few kilometres from the small town of Bergen near Celle. The camp grounds were taken over by units of the 11th Armoured Division of VIII Corps. According to the findings of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial and British reports from those days, the soldiers found about 60,000 prisoners in the camp and the nearby barracks, most of them desperately starved and sick, along with more than 13,000 unburied bodies. Typhus was raging in and between the huts.

Bergen-Belsen was not an extermination camp. It had no gas chambers, and people were not brought there to be killed on arrival. They died there of hunger, disease and neglect, at a rate that in the last weeks of the war exceeded the death rate in many camps of greater notoriety. The images recorded by British cameramen and photographers in the days that followed became, for the British and in time for the whole world, the best-known testimony to the crimes of the German camps.

An exchange camp and a camp for the sick

Between 1935 and 1937 the Wehrmacht built a large armoured training ground with barracks on the site of the future camp. From 1940 the huts left by the construction workers served as a prisoner-of-war camp for French and Belgian soldiers, and from 1941 as Stalag XI-C for Soviet prisoners of war. In the autumn and winter of 1941/1942 thousands of them died of hunger and disease; according to the Memorial, nearly 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war had been buried in the POW cemetery by the end of the war. In the autumn of 1944, after the surrender of the Warsaw Uprising, some thousand Home Army soldiers were held in a separate section of the POW camp.

In April 1943 the SS took over part of the site. Bergen-Belsen was to be a “residence camp” (Aufenthaltslager) for Jews whom the Germans intended to exchange for their own citizens interned abroad or for foreign currency. The SS divided it into sections: a “special camp” for Polish Jews, a “star camp” for Dutch Jews brought from the Westerbork camp, a “neutrals camp” for citizens of neutral states, and a “Hungarian camp”. The “special camp” received, among others, Jews who in 1943 had come forward at the Hotel Polski in Warsaw, hoping to leave on Latin American passports. When the governments of most of those countries refused to recognise the documents, the SS in October 1943 sent about 1,800 of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were murdered in the gas chambers. In 1944 the “Hungarian camp” received the passengers of the train negotiated by Rezső Kasztner; most of them were released to Switzerland in August and December 1944. According to Memorial studies, at least 14,600 Jews passed through the exchange camp, but the Germans actually allowed only about 2,500 to leave the country.

From March 1944 prisoners too sick to work were sent to Bergen-Belsen from other camps. Part of the camp was named the “recovery camp” (Erholungslager), but the sick received neither treatment nor adequate food there. In August 1944 a women’s camp was established. The first prisoners were Polish women deported from Warsaw during the Warsaw Uprising; they were followed by thousands of Jewish women from Poland and Hungary transferred from Auschwitz. At the end of October or the beginning of November 1944 the sisters Margot and Anne Frank were brought there from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

The winter of 1944/1945

In December 1944 SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer became commandant of the camp; he had previously commanded Birkenau at the time when the Hungarian Jews were being murdered there. From then on Bergen-Belsen became the place to which the SS brought prisoners from the evacuated camps in the east, and later from camps deep inside the Reich as well. According to the Memorial, at least 85,000 people arrived by rail transport and on death marches between December 1944 and April 1945. In July 1944 the camp held about 7,300 prisoners, in December about 15,000, and in February 1945 about 22,000. In the first half of April, when transports arrived from Mittelbau-Dora and the subcamps of Neuengamme, the number in the camp itself exceeded 50,000, and some fifteen thousand men were placed in the neighbouring barracks of the training ground.

The camp had been built for a few thousand people. There were not enough huts, bunks, water or food. Prisoners lay on bare floors, often without blankets. From the beginning of 1945 typhus, typhoid fever, dysentery and tuberculosis spread. The Memorial estimates that about 35,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen between January and mid-April 1945, compared with about 3,100 in 1943–1944 combined. The crematorium could not keep up with the bodies, which lay between the huts or were thrown into pits. Margot and Anne Frank died of typhus in February or March 1945; in 2015 the Anne Frank House moved the date of their deaths to February rather than March, as had previously been assumed. In April the Czech painter and writer Josef Čapek, brother of Karel and coiner of the word “robot”, died in the camp.

The camp’s victims were Jews from all over Europe, Poles, Russians, Czechs, French, Dutch, Roma and Sinti, as well as Germans imprisoned as opponents of the regime. The survivors of Bergen-Belsen included Ceija Stojka, an Austrian Romani woman who had previously been through Birkenau and Ravensbrück, and the Belgian Robert Maistriau, one of those who took part in the attack on the Twentieth Convoy to Auschwitz in 1943.

The neutral zone

At the beginning of April 1945 the British Second Army of General Miles Dempsey, which had crossed the Rhine in March, was advancing through Lower Saxony towards the Elbe. Bergen-Belsen lay in its path. The German command in the area feared that fighting around the camp and the escape of infected prisoners would spread typhus to the surrounding area and to its own troops. According to the accepted account in the literature, Heinrich Himmler agreed on 11 April that the camp should be handed over without a fight. At the same time the SS ordered the prisoners to bury some of the bodies, and some of the SS men left the camp.

On 12 April Wehrmacht officers crossed the British lines under a white flag near Winsen an der Aller and were taken to VIII Corps headquarters. At about one in the morning of 13 April an agreement was signed: a neutral zone of some 48 square kilometres was established around the camp, from which the troops of both sides were to withdraw. Most of the SS men were allowed to leave; the commandant, Kramer, and a small group of the staff, including female guards, remained in the camp to “maintain order”. External guard duties were performed by Hungarian and German soldiers, whom the British were later to send back behind the front line. Heavy fighting around Winsen and Walle meant that the British did not reach the camp on 14 April as planned.

15 April

On the afternoon of 15 April the first to come upon the camp – by chance, according to the accepted account – were Lieutenant John Randall of the Special Air Service and his driver, who were reconnoitring ahead of the spearhead of the 11th Armoured Division. Soon afterwards the loudspeaker vans of a British propaganda unit drove up to the gate. Its officer, Captain Derrick Sington, announced in German to the prisoners that they were free and drove into the camp accompanied by Kramer, who showed the British around as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. Individual Canadian and American units working alongside the British also took part in the liberation and in the first days of work in the camp. The administration of the camp was taken over by the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, under Lieutenant Colonel Richard Taylor.

What the soldiers saw was beyond anything they could have imagined. Thousands of naked and half-naked bodies lay between the huts, often in heaps. The living sat or lay beside the dead; many were too weak to stand. According to British reports, the camp had been without water for several days, and the prisoners had for a long time received almost nothing to eat. In the first hours and days after the liberation, according to eyewitnesses, Hungarian guards shot several more prisoners who had rushed the food stores, and some prisoners killed hated kapos. Kramer was soon arrested, and the SS men and female guards who had remained in the camp were made to bury the dead with their bare hands. Officials from Celle and the surrounding area were also brought to the camp to see what had been happening a few kilometres from their homes.

The first BBC correspondent in the camp, Richard Dimbleby, recorded a report that was broadcast on 19 April. The BBC at first held it back, unable to believe what it contained; according to his colleagues’ recollections, Dimbleby threatened never to speak into a microphone again if the report was not broadcast. He spoke of an acre of ground on which the dead and the dying lay so that one could not tell them apart, and of a mother who thrust into a British sentry’s arms a baby that had been dead for several days. He ended with the words: “This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.” British cameramen and photographers of No. 5 Army Film and Photographic Unit documented the camp from 15 April until early June; their photographs and films, now in the collections of the Imperial War Museum, went round the world.

Saving the living

The relief operation was directed by Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes, deputy director of medical services of the Second Army. The British had a few medical units at their disposal but needed hospitals for tens of thousands of people. A hospital was set up in the nearby training-ground barracks, along with stations where the sick were washed and deloused; over the following weeks everyone who could be moved was transferred there from the camp. Help came from the British Red Cross, volunteers from other organisations and about 100 medical students from London hospitals. Doctors and nurses from among the prisoners themselves also worked, among them Hadassah Bimko, a dentist from Sosnowiec, who organised care for the sick in the women’s camp.

Feeding the starving proved harder than expected. Army rations, especially fatty tinned beef, proved deadly to many of the most severely emaciated. The doctors tried skimmed milk first, then a special mixture used after the Bengal famine of 1943, while attempts at intravenous feeding were abandoned because prisoners who had seen SS doctors kill with injections panicked at the sight of syringes. Despite all these efforts, according to the Memorial, about 9,000 of the liberated died in April and a further 4,000 by the end of June 1945 – some 13,000 people in all.

The huts emptied of the sick were burned with flamethrowers to destroy the lice and halt the epidemic. The last hut went up in flames on 21 May 1945.

The displaced persons camp and the trial

A displaced persons camp, one of the largest in the British occupation zone, was set up in the barracks. It housed Jewish survivors as well as thousands of Poles, former prisoners and forced labourers. The camp’s Jewish committee was headed by Josef Rosensaft, a survivor from Będzin. The Jewish DP camp operated until 1950; many of its residents left for Palestine, and after 1948 for Israel, while many went to the United States.

From 17 September to 17 November 1945, in what became known as the Belsen trial, a British military tribunal in Lüneburg tried 45 members of the Bergen-Belsen staff, including several kapos. Many of them were also charged with crimes committed earlier at Auschwitz. Glyn Hughes, Hadassah Bimko and other survivors gave evidence. Eleven defendants, among them Kramer and the guard Irma Grese, were sentenced to death; the sentences were carried out on 13 December 1945 in the prison at Hameln. Fourteen defendants were acquitted, and the rest received prison sentences, most of them later considerably reduced. More than two hundred other staff members known by name never stood trial.

Place in the history of the war

Bergen-Belsen was not the first camp seen by the soldiers of the Western Allies. The Americans had earlier reached Ohrdruf and Buchenwald, and two days before the British entered Bergen-Belsen, SS men and their helpers burned more than a thousand prisoners alive in a barn near Gardelegen. The Red Army had earlier liberated Majdanek and Auschwitz. Yet in Britain and in much of the world it was Bergen-Belsen that became the symbol of the German camps. This was the result of the scale of what was found there, the photographs and films, Dimbleby’s report, and the fact that the camp was liberated in the last weeks of the war, when the Western press was ready to believe what only a few years earlier had seemed incredible.

This image had its limitations. Because Belsen was presented as a “death camp”, many people in the West for years identified the Holocaust with the camps in Germany rather than with the extermination centres in occupied Poland, such as Birkenau, Treblinka and Bełżec, where most of the murdered Jews died. British reports in 1945 often spoke of “political prisoners” and victims of various nationalities without stressing that most of the prisoners in the camp were Jews. Only later research made it possible to place Bergen-Belsen in its proper position within the camp system.

According to current estimates, some 120,000 prisoners passed through the concentration camp and more than 50,000 people died there, not counting the nearly 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war who died in the POW camp. On the site of the burned camp there now stand memorials erected by survivors, among them a Jewish memorial unveiled on the first anniversary of the liberation, an international obelisk and a monument to the Polish prisoners, as well as a museum. The history of Bergen-Belsen belongs to the last chapter of the war in Europe, in which the Allies, as they occupied the Reich, uncovered one camp and crime scene after another, and their photographs and films later went into courtrooms as evidence.