Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

• 1. Introduction

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  Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony, northern Germany, situated southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. When British troops entered it on the afternoon of the 15th of April 1945, they found over 13,000 unburied bodies and around 60,000 inmates, most of them acutely sick and starving. The prisoners had gone without food or water for days. Immediately before and after liberation, people were dying at around 500 per day, mostly from typhus.

  The BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied the liberating soldiers, described what he saw: "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 look at the terrible sights around them... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live."

  Dimbleby called that day at Belsen the most horrible of his life. What the soldiers found had been building for years, through a sequence of administrative decisions, mass transports, and catastrophic overcrowding that turned a military construction workers's camp into one of the most notorious sites of the twentieth century. How Bergen-Belsen reached that state, who passed through it, who tried to help, and how the world afterward chose to remember it are questions worth following in detail.

• 2. From Barracks to POW Camp

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  In 1935, the Wehrmacht began building a large military complex close to the village of Belsen. By 1937 the barracks were finished, and the site became the largest military training area in Germany at the time, used for armoured vehicle training. It has been in continuous operation ever since and is today known as Bergen-Hohne Training Area, used by NATO armed forces.

  The workers who built those original structures were housed in camps near Fallingbostel and Bergen. Once construction was completed in 1938-39, those workers' camps fell empty. After Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939, the Wehrmacht repurposed the huts as a prisoner of war camp.

  In June 1940, Belgian and French prisoners of war were housed in the former Bergen-Belsen construction workers' camp. From June 1941, as Germany prepared to invade the Soviet Union, the installation expanded into an independent camp known as Stalag XI-C (311), intended to hold up to 20,000 Soviet POWs. Two similar camps operated nearby, at Oerbke and Wietzendorf. By the end of March 1942, some 41,000 Soviet POWs had died across all three camps from starvation, exhaustion, and disease. By the war's end, the total dead in those camps had reached 50,000. When the POW camp at Bergen finally ceased operation in early 1945, its cemetery contained over 19,500 dead Soviet prisoners.

  In the summer of 1943, Stalag XI-C was dissolved. Bergen-Belsen became a branch camp of the larger Stalag XI-B and served as the hospital for all Soviet POWs in the region until January 1945. From August 1944, Italian military internees were added. Following the suppression of the Warsaw Uprising in October 1944, around 1,000 members of the Polish Home Army were imprisoned in a separate section of the POW camp.

• 3. The Exchange Camp Fiction

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  In April 1943, the SS Economic-Administration Main Office took over part of Bergen-Belsen, drawing it into the concentration camp system. The SS gave the facility a careful bureaucratic designation: initially a Zivilinterniertenlager, or civilian internment camp, then in June 1943 redesignated as an Aufenthaltslager, a holding camp. The reason for the rename was practical. The Geneva Conventions required civilian internment camps to be open to inspection by international committees; a holding camp carried no such obligation.

  The official purpose of this section was to hold Jewish prisoners who might be exchanged for German civilians interned abroad, or traded for hard currency. The SS divided the exchange camp into subsections: a "Hungarian camp", a "special camp" for Polish Jews, a "neutrals camp" for citizens of neutral countries, and a "Star camp" for Dutch Jews. Between the summer of 1943 and December 1944, at least 14,600 Jews, including 2,750 minors, were transported to Bergen-Belsen under this arrangement.

  Many were put to work in the "shoe commando", salvaging usable leather from shoes collected from all over Germany and occupied Europe. Because their potential exchange value gave them a degree of protection, prisoners in the exchange camp were generally treated less harshly than others, at least for much of the war.

  But the exchange fiction had a brutal underside. In October 1943, the SS selected 1,800 men and women from the special camp, Polish Jews who held passports from Latin American countries. Because those governments mostly refused to honour the passports, these people had lost their value to the regime. Under the false pretext of transfer to a place called "Lager Bergau", they were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and murdered in the gas chambers. In February and May 1944, another 350 prisoners from the special camp were sent to Auschwitz. Out of the total 14,600 exchange prisoners, at least 3,550 died: more than 1,400 at Belsen, and around 2,150 at Auschwitz. In the end, only around 2,560 Jewish prisoners were ever actually released from Bergen-Belsen and allowed to leave Germany.

• 4. Overcrowding and Collapse

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  In December 1944, SS-Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Kramer arrived from Auschwitz-Birkenau and took over as camp commandant. By January 1945, the SS had assumed control of the POW hospital and began enlarging Bergen-Belsen dramatically. As the eastern concentration camps were evacuated ahead of the Red Army's advance, at least 85,000 people were transported in cattle cars or marched to Belsen.

  The numbers tell the story of a system disintegrating under its own weight. In July 1944 there were 7,300 prisoners at Belsen. By December 1944 that figure had risen to 15,000. By February 1945 it reached 22,000. By the 15th of April 1945, the day of liberation, it had soared to around 60,000. The camp had been built to hold about 10,000 inmates.

  The death rate tracked the population curve. From 1943 to the end of 1944, around 3,100 people died. From January to mid-April 1945, that figure rose to around 35,000. The monthly breakdown is stark: in December 1944, at least 360 people died; in January 1945, around 1,200; in February, around 6,400; in March, at least 18,168; and in April, around 10,000.

  In March 1944, a section had been redesignated as an Erholungslager, a "recovery camp", where prisoners too sick to work were brought from other camps. They were supposed to recuperate and return to labour, but many died of disease, starvation, and lack of medical attention. In August 1944, a separate women's camp was created; by November 1944 it held around 9,000 women and young girls. Among them were Margot and Anne Frank, who both died there in February or March 1945.

  In the summer of 1944, at least 200 men in the male section of the recovery camp were murdered by SS order, injected with phenol. There were no gas chambers at Bergen-Belsen itself; the mass killings of that kind took place further east. Even so, current estimates put the total number of deaths at Belsen at more than 50,000, among them the Czech painter and writer Josef Capek, who had coined the word robot, and the French Resistance member Jean Maurice Paul Jules de Noailles, the 6th Duke of Ayen, who died on the 14th of April 1945, one day before liberation.

• 5. Liberation and Its Aftermath

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  When British and Canadian forces advanced on Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, the German army negotiated a truce and an exclusion zone around the camp to prevent typhus from spreading. On the 11th of April 1945, Heinrich Himmler agreed to hand the camp over without a fight. At around 1 a.m. on April 13, an agreement was signed designating an area of 48 square kilometres around the camp as a neutral zone. Heavy fighting near Winsen and Walle prevented the British from reaching Belsen on April 14 as originally planned.

  The first two people to reach the camp were a British Special Air Service officer, Lieutenant John Randall, and his jeep driver, on a reconnaissance mission who discovered it by chance. The formal liberation came on the afternoon of April 15.

  Initially lacking sufficient manpower, British commanders allowed Hungarian guards to remain in charge. Some of those guards, along with remaining SS personnel, then shot and killed some of the starving prisoners who were trying to reach food supplies. On April 20, four German fighter planes attacked the camp, damaging the water supply and killing three British medical orderlies.

  Feeding the survivors proved its own crisis. Army rations caused harm because the prisoners' digestive systems could not handle them after long-term starvation. Skimmed milk helped only partially. Eventually the British turned to the Bengal Famine Mixture, a rice-and-sugar preparation that had worked after the Bengal famine of 1943, though it proved less suitable to European constitutions than to Bengali ones. Adding paprika made it more palatable, and recovery began. Intravenous feeding was attempted but abandoned, partly because SS doctors had previously used injections to murder prisoners, and some patients panicked at the sight of the equipment.

  A team of 96 medical student volunteers from London teaching hospitals, led by A. P. Meiklejohn, was later credited with significantly reducing the death rate. Despite those efforts, around 9,000 more people died in April 1945, and another 4,000 by the end of June, bringing total deaths after liberation to nearly 14,000. The camp itself was burned to the ground by flamethrowing Bren gun carriers and Churchill Crocodile tanks to stop the spread of typhus.

• 6. Trial and Reckoning

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  Many of the SS staff who survived the typhus epidemic were tried by a British military tribunal in Luneburg. The Belsen trial ran from September 17 to the 17th of November 1945, and put 45 defendants in the dock: former commandant Josef Kramer, 16 other male SS members, 16 female SS guards, and 12 former kapos. Among them were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Hertha Ehlert, Johanna Bormann, and Fritz Klein. Charges covered crimes at Belsen but also earlier ones at Auschwitz.

  Eleven defendants were sentenced to death, including Kramer, Volkenrath, and Klein. The executions by hanging took place on the 13th of December 1945, in Hamelin. Fourteen were acquitted. Of the remaining 19, one was sentenced to life in prison but was later executed for another crime; the other 18 received prison terms of between one and 15 years, most of which were substantially reduced on appeal or clemency. By June 1955, the last person sentenced in the Belsen trial had been released.

  Denazification courts tried at least 46 former SS staff at Belsen between 1947 and 1949. Around half those proceedings were discontinued, mainly because the judges considered the defendants to have been forced into the SS. Those who were convicted received short prison terms or fines, and time already spent in Allied internment was counted toward the sentence, meaning most were considered to have already served their time.

  Only one trial was ever held by a German court for crimes committed at Belsen, at Jena in 1949; the defendant was acquitted. More than 200 known SS members from Belsen never faced trial. No German soldier was ever prosecuted for crimes against the POW camp inmates at Bergen-Belsen, despite the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg having found in 1946 that the Wehrmacht's treatment of Soviet POWs constituted a war crime.

• 7. Memory and Memorial

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  After the buildings were burned and the nearby displaced persons camp closed in the summer of 1950, the Bergen-Belsen site fell into neglect, reverting to heath with few visible traces remaining. Yet memorialisation had begun almost immediately. As early as May 1945, the British erected large signs at the former camp site. A wooden memorial built by Jewish displaced persons went up in September 1945, followed by a stone successor dedicated on the first anniversary of liberation in 1946. On the 2nd of November 1945, a large wooden cross was dedicated to the murdered Polish prisoners. By the end of 1945, the Soviets had also built a memorial at the entrance to the POW cemetery.

  For much of the 1950s, Belsen "was increasingly forgotten as a place of remembrance". Only after 1957 did large groups of young people begin visiting the site where Anne Frank had died. A turning point came after anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled on the Cologne synagogue over Christmas 1959. German chancellor Konrad Adenauer, following a suggestion by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, visited Bergen-Belsen, the first time a German chancellor had visited a former concentration camp. In a speech there, Adenauer assured Jews still living in Germany of equal respect and security.

  In October 1979, Simone Veil, president of the European Parliament and herself a survivor of both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, gave a speech at the memorial focused on the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti. It was the first time any official event in Germany formally acknowledged that aspect of the Nazi era.

  In 1985, international attention fell on the site when Ronald Reagan added Bergen-Belsen to his West Germany itinerary after controversy over a planned visit to a cemetery containing Waffen SS graves. Shortly before Reagan's visit on May 5, German president Richard von Weizsacker and chancellor Helmut Kohl attended a large ceremony marking the 40th anniversary of the liberation. The Lower Saxony parliament subsequently voted to expand the exhibition centre and hire permanent scientific staff. In October 2007, a redesigned memorial site opened, including a new Documentation Centre. Only in 2000 had the Federal Government of Germany begun providing financial support; since 2009, that funding has been ongoing.

  Among the personal testimonies that shaped public understanding, Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin recorded one detail that has stayed with many readers: the arrival, shortly after the British Red Cross came, of a large quantity of lipstick. He wrote that he wished he could find who had asked for it, calling the gesture "the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance." Women with no sheets, no nightgowns, nothing but blankets, wore scarlet red lips. One woman was found dead on a post-mortem table, a piece of lipstick clutched in her hand. Gonin wrote that the lipstick had started to give them back their humanity.