Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp during World War II. About 120,000 people were held in the concentration camp.^[1] At least 52,000 people died in the concentration camp or soon after because of how they were treated there.^[2] There was also a prisoner of war camp at Bergen-Belsen where at least 19,700 more people died.^[2]

Liberation

The camp was liberated on 15 April 1945 by British soldiers.^[3] There were around 55,000 people in the concentration camp.^[3] They also found more than 13,000 unburied dead bodies.^[4]

The scenes were horrific. They were described by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who was with the British soldiers:

“	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 [soldier] to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny [baby] 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.[5]	”
—Richard Dimbleby

Notable inmates

• Anne Frank
• Margot Frank

Photo gallery

• 
  British Army soldiers free the camp on April 15, 1945
• 
  After freeing the camp, British soldiers use bulldozers to push dead bodies into mass graves
• 
  Women survivors in Bergen-Belsen, April 1945
• 
  Former camp guards are forced to load the bodies of dead prisoners onto a truck for burial, April 17–18, 1945
• 
  Nazi Dr. Fritz Klein stands amongst corpses in Mass Grave 3
• 
  A crowd watches the last camp hut be destroyed

Related pages

• Genocide
• World War II
• Kristallnacht
• Nazi Germany
• The Holocaust
• Antisemitism in Europe
• Jedwabne pogrom (1941)
• Nazi concentration camps

Other websites

• Investigating Bergen-Belsen | Imperial War Museums on iwm.org.uk