On the 15th April 1945, the British Army and the Canadians entered the gates of Bergen-Belsen
and managed to liberate a concentration camp where death surrounded every corner.
What the liberators found would haunt them to the rest of their days, with the true evils
of the third reich on display.
They found over 13,000 dead bodies and around 60,000 living inmates who were starving and
many were sick from disease and illness.
Bergen-Belsen is remembered today for being the site where Anne Frank died, and also where
there was a huge and immense amount of suffering.
As the Second World War turned against the Germans, thousands of prisoners were transported
to Bergen-Belsen to ensure that they were kept away from advancing Red Army soldiers.
Because of this the conditions at Belsen heavily deteriorated.
Inside the camp also the British found a number of SS guards and members of staff, who later
were sentenced to death and executed for their crimes.
So join us today as we look at, ‘The liberation of Bergen-Belsen.’
Remember to support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
Bergen-Belsen initially began as a military complex, and it was the largest in Germany
at the time in the mid 1930s, but as the Second World War broke out the huts began to be transferred
into prisoner of war barracks, and Belsen became a POW camp.
These huts became known as Stalag 11-B, and it was one of the largest Wehrmacht camps,
with up to 95,000 prisoners being held from different countries.
In April 1943, part of the Belsen camp was taken over by the SS Economic Administration
Main Office, and it became a concentration camp run by the SS.
It was initially planned to have been a civilian internment camp, but then became a holding
camp.
It was planned to be a holding and exchange camp for Jews who were then to be exchanged
for German civilians and POWs in prisoner swaps, or they were to be swapped for money.
Some inmates were forced to work whilst they were held at Belsen, and many of them were
forced to salvage usable pieces of leather from shoes, to recycle them and then these
parts could be used later on.
But as the war continued, in 1944 part of Belsen became a recovery camp where prisoners
who were too sick to work at other places were sent, they were meant to recover here
and then return later to work, but the majority of them died from disease, exhaustion, starvation
or insufficient medical care.
There was a women’s camp opened in August 1944, and nab winner were sent here from other
camps such as Auschwitz.
However, in December 1944 Josef Kramer, who would go down in history as the Beast of Belsen
became the commandant.
It was during his command that Belsen grew to a size that it was not conceivable, and
with this the camp expanded to a size that conditions suffered greatly.
As many of the concentration camps towards the East were evacuated as the Red Army was
advancing towards Germany, thousands of prisoners were transported to Belsen.
At least 85,000 people were sent in cattle carts or were marched to the camp, but already
the prisoner numbers had been increasing.
Within months, thousands were being sent there and the overcrowding lead to huge issues with
disease.
Deadly outbreaks of typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever and dysentry ravaged throughout
the camp.
Belsen was holding at least 7 times its intended 10,000 prisoners, and there was also a huge
lack of food with prisoners not having regular meals.
It’s believed that 120,000 people passed throughout the camp, but around 55,000 died
because of the conditions.
There were no gas chambers there, but the real killer at Belsen was the neglect and
overcrowding, and in March 1945 it’s estimated that in just one month at least over 18000
people were dying there.
Death accelerated as more prisoners came to Belsen and more strain was placed on the camp.
It was said that, ‘Soon after arrival at Belsen we found ourselves covered from head
to foot with lice.
The camp was completely infested.
No food was coming into the camp and the water supply had been cut off.
Like leaves that fall from a tree, people were falling down and dying.
There was sheer chaos in the camp.’
In Spring 1945, the advancing allied soldiers continued their movements throughout German
occupied lands.
Belsen itself was found in Lower Saxony, and around 40 miles from Hanover.
The 11th Armoured Division in particular had driven into Germany after landing on Juno
Beach following the D-Day invasions months before, and in particular it saw heavy combat
inside of Germany.
Divisional units continued towards the Osnabruck Canal within Lower Saxony, and they continued
their advancement throughout the area as the days continued.
Along with the 63rd anti tank regiment, they arrived in the area near to Bergen-Belsen.
After the British and Canadians entered the area near to Belsen, the German Army managed
to negotiate a truce and exclusion zone around Belsen, to prevent typhus spreading any further.
Because of this on the 11th April 1945, Reichsfuhrer SS- Heinrich Himmler negotiated with the Allies
to ensure that Belsen was to be handed over to the allies without.
Fight or any bloodshed.
The SS guards were then ordered by himmler to try and cover up some of the crimes by
burying the dead hastily in graves, but the huge amount of corpses littered around Belsen
made the job impossible.
On the 12th April 1945, representatives from the Wehrmacht met with the the British D Squadron
of the Inns of Court Regiment, on a bridge near to the town on Winsen.
They were taken to the 8 Corps, to sort out arrangements for the liberation.
At 1am on the 13th April, everything was agreed and an agreement signed that stated that 48
square kilometres around Belsen were declared as a neutral zone, and that no fighting was
to occur inside of the area.
As part of this, a number of the SS staff who had worked there and who had committed
a number of atrocities were allowed to leave Belsen without any further punishment.
A few of these were captured after the war, but many escaped any form of justice.
There were a number of SS men and women who were to remain inside the camp including commandant
Josef Kramer to maintain law and order, and many of these following the liberation were
placed on trial.
The area around the camp was being guarded by members of the Wehrmacht, who were then
taken prisoner by the British and were then passed back over to the German Army near to
the frontlines.
But at the time there had been a large amount of fighting in the area around Belsen which
made getting to the camp initially rather difficult and tricky to get to.
This delayed the liberation for a few days, until the camp was finally liberated on the
afternoon of the 15th April 1945.
Leftenant John Randall and his driver of the SAS were the first to arrive whilst conducting
a recon mission, and they came across Belsen by accident.
But when the allied soldiers arrived, they were greeted by a horrific sight that as mentioned
would accompany many until the day they died.
When British, Canadian and a few American soldiers entered the gates and reached Belsen,
they were greeted by a horrific sight of death, depravity and devastation.
Inside of the camp were 13,000 unburied corpses and 60,000 prisoners who were dying.
Before the liberation, hundreds were dying each day from diseases and in particular typhus.
The prisoners were being starved and had not eaten or drank for days, and because of this
they were incredibly desperate.
The liberation for the prisoners must have been a great relief, but for the liberators
it was hard to comprehend the people who had committed such crimes against other people.
One liberator, Corporal Ian Forsyth stated how, ‘we weren’t expecting to see anything.
We didn’t know there was such a place.
We had been going ahead without any idea there was anything there, I think that was the worst
part.
I could not believe what I was seeing.
I could not believe people could sink to that level and treat people the way they treated
these prisoners.
When you see a person who is a living skeleton, as these people were it is difficult.
It’s astonishing that any human being could survive the terrible torture.
Anybody who didn’t see the place as we saw it would find it difficult to believe what
we actually saw.
Bodies stretched out on the ground.
Nobody had the strength to move them.
The people on the other side of the barbed wire didn’t know who we were, they just
stared as we approached.’
Another eyewitnesses stated, ‘The bodies were a ghastly sight.
Some were green.
They looked like skeletons covered with skin—the flesh had all gone.
There were bodies of small children among the grown ups.
In other parts of the camp there were hundreds of bodies lying around, in many cases piled
five or six high.’
Along with the dead were thousands of emaciated prisoners.
A BBC Reporter, Richard Dimbleby described the scenes in a report that was believed at
the time to have been too graphic.
He said, ‘...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.’
The huge scale of the cleanup operation at Bergen-Belsen initially could not be completed
by the manpower provided by the allies, and more soldiers were drafted in to help.
Initially only Josef Kramer the commandant was placed under arrest, but after liberation
a number of SS and Hungarian guards killed some of the prisoners who were trying to access
food in the store houses.
With this, a number of revenge killings also occured inside one of Belsen’s satellite
camps, with prisoners and also allied soldiers killing guards who worked at Belsen.
The liberators immediately tried to provide emergency medical care, clothes and food to
the people, but bloodshed did occur.
On the day of liberation, 170 Kapos who were initially prisoners inside of Belsen but were
tasked with working with the guards were killed for their work.
But 5 days after liberation, the Germans attacked Belsen with fighter aircraft, which caused
damage to the water supply and also killed 3 British soldiers.
As the days continued after liberation, prisoners were deloused and were then transported to
a different camp, and 29,000 were transported there over 4 weeks.
The British forced the SS guards and staff to help in the effort to bury the dead in
mass graves, and many other Germans were brought in from nearby areas to help bury the dead.
The clean up was captured on video and in photographs, showing the former SS staff including
doctors and guards who were pictured amongst the mass depravity.
After this was done, the British then to kill any lice or bacteria inside of Belsen, then
burned down the camp using Churchill crocodile flame throwing tanks and adapted Bren gun
carriers to kill the typhus epidemic.
Following this, there were a number of SS staff who worked at Belsen who were brought
to trial.
There were roughly 500 people who were known to have worked at Belsen, but only a small
percentage of these were ever brought to justice.
The Belsen Trials were a high profile war crimes trial that saw 11 people sentenced
to death for crimes they had committed.
What shocked many around the world was that many of the defendants were women, young women
in particular in their 20s who had reputations for brutality, murder and depravity.
Irma Grese and Elisabeth Volkenrath in particular were sentenced to death, but both were in
their 20s and both had reputations for murder, and they had also worked at Auschwitz too.
The executions of those who had committed crimes at Belsen were carried out in Hamelin
prison by British executioner Albert Pierrepoint.
Today the site of Bergen Belsen is marked with memorials to those people who died inside
of the camp.
Several mass grave markers mark the sites where thousands were interred after liberation.
It was said by one liberator, ‘But what should you do when faced with 60,000 dead,
sick and dying people?
We were in the army to fight a war and to beat the enemy.
We were good at that, having been in combat for the last ten months, but none of us had
any experience of dealing with the situation in Belsen and we were all more or less traumatized
by the sights we had seen.
I myself, although a 'senior officer', had turned 25 years of age only a few days before.
Most of the men sent to deal with that human disaster were in their late teens or early
twenties, even younger than I was.
What we suddenly found ourselves faced with was beyond anyone's comprehension.’
What occured inside of Belsen was a horrific war crime, but only a few people were ever
brought to justice for it.
It was a place where dozens of thousands died, and where the true evils of the third reich
were carried out.
Once again thanks for watching.
To support our channel, please make sure to subscribe.
Once again thanks for watching.