When British soldiers arrived at Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, they expected to find another German prison camp.
Instead, they walked into a nightmare that even years of war had not prepared them for.
What they discovered would become one of the [music] most shocking scenes of the entire Second World War.
The German military built the camp in 1940 as a prisoner of war camp on a flat, empty [music] piece of land near the town of Bergen in the Lüneburg Heath region of northern Germany.
The area was isolated.
The soil was sandy and poor.
Winters were cold and harsh.
At first, it was used to hold Soviet and French prisoners of war captured during Germany’s earlier victories.
Conditions were already deadly.
By the end of 1941, more than 14,000 Soviet prisoners had died there from starvation, exposure to the weather, disease, and deliberate neglect.
The camp had been operating for less than a year.
In April 1943, the SS, the organization controlled by Heinrich Himmler that ran Nazi security and concentration camp operations, officially took over the site.
Bergen-Belsen was redesignated as an exchange camp.
The idea was simple, but cruel.
Jewish prisoners who had foreign passports or connections to neutral countries would be held there and potentially exchanged for German citizens being held abroad.
In reality, most of these exchanges never happened.
The prisoners remained trapped in the camp waiting for deals that were never made.
By the middle of 1944, the Soviet Red Army had broken through German defenses in the east and was pushing steadily toward Poland and deeper into Nazi-controlled territory.
As German forces retreated, Nazi leaders began evacuating concentration camps in the East.
Part of the goal was to hide evidence of the crimes that had been committed there.
Prisoners from such camps as Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen, and Stutthof were packed onto trains or forced to march westward.
These evacuations became known as death marches.
Thousands died along the roads from exhaustion, starvation, disease, shootings, and exposure to the weather.
Tens of thousands more were sent to camps farther inside Germany.
Bergen-Belsen received a huge number of these prisoners.
The camp had never been designed to hold so many people.
In January 1945, around 22,000 prisoners were being held there.
By March 1945, the population had exploded to more than 60,000.
The SS made almost no effort to increase food supplies, water systems, housing, or medical care to match the growing numbers.
There was no real plan for managing the overcrowding.
With overcrowding, came disease.
One of the worst was typhus, a deadly illness caused by the bacterium Rickettsia prowazekii.
It spreads through body lice.
In a place where tens of thousands of starving people were packed together without proper washing facilities, clean clothing, or sanitation, lice spread rapidly.
By early 1945, typhus was tearing through the camp at a catastrophic rate.
In March 1945 alone, an estimated 18,100 people died inside Bergen-Belsen.
That worked out to roughly 586 deaths every single day.
The dead were no longer being buried properly.
The camp no longer had enough workers, resources, or organization to handle the growing number of bodies.
Corpses piled up outside the barracks, along the camp roads, and inside open pits near the edges of the camp.
The commandant of Bergen-Belsen, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, who had previously served as commandant of Auschwitz-Birkenau, had reported to his superiors describing the worsening conditions.
No meaningful help arrived.
By late March 1945, the British Second Army commanded by General Miles Dempsey had crossed the Rhine River and was advancing rapidly through northern Germany.
Town after town was falling.
Across large sections of the front, German resistance was beginning to collapse.
At the front of this advance was the 11th Armoured Division.
Its soldiers had fought from the beaches of Normandy after D-Day in June 1944, through France and Belgium and into Germany itself.
They were experienced combat veterans who’d seen years of war, but nothing they had encountered before could prepare them for what was waiting about 30 miles ahead.
On April 12th, 1945, a German officer approached British forward positions under a white flag.
The message came directly from Josef Kramer.
He proposed a local truce.
The British would agree not to shell or bomb the Bergen-Belsen area, and the Germans would hand the camp over without a fight.
Kramer had his own reasons for making the offer.
He feared the spread of typhus and knew that the arrival of British forces would likely determine his own fate.
The British agreed to a temporary cease-fire around the camp so the handover could take place.
On April 15th, 1945, soldiers from the 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment of the 11th Armoured Division arrived at Bergen-Belsen’s main gate.
Among the first British officers to enter was Lieutenant-Colonel Mervyn Gonin of the 11th Light Field Ambulance.
Kramer was waiting for them at the entrance, still dressed in his SS uniform.
Within hours, he was under arrest.
The gates opened.
The soldiers [music] walked inside.
The smell reached the British soldiers before they even reached the camp gates.
Inside the fences were around 60,000 living prisoners.
Scattered across the camp were about 13,000 unburied bodies lying in the open.
Corpses lay on roads, against barrack walls, and piled inside ditches.
In some places, it was difficult to tell who was alive and who was dead.
The survivors were so weak that many could no longer move the bodies.
Many could barely move themselves.
The barracks were packed far beyond capacity.
People were lying on top of one another because there was no space left.
The camp’s water system had stopped functioning.
Food distribution had almost completely collapsed [music] during the final weeks before liberation.
Dysentery, a severe disease that causes extreme diarrhea and dehydration, had spread widely.
The ground around many barracks was covered in human waste, creating conditions that soldiers later struggled to [music] describe in their reports.
Captain Derrick Sington, a British intelligence officer who entered the camp during the first hours, later remembered hearing a strange sound.
It was a low noise rising across the camp.
>> [music] >> Thousands of prisoners were trying to react to the arrival of soldiers who were not SS guards.
They were too weak to cheer or to shout, but they made noise anyway.
Some survivors crawled toward [music] British troops.
Others simply stared in disbelief.
Among the 60,000 survivors were prisoners from Hungary, Poland, the Netherlands, Czechoslovakia, and Germany.
Most were Jewish.
Children wandered alone between the bodies.
[music] Some had spent so much time inside camps that they could barely remember life before imprisonment.
Two young sisters who had been transferred from Auschwitz-Birkenau to Bergen-Belsen in October 1944 were no longer alive.
Margot Frank, aged 19, died from typhus in late February or early March 1945.
Her sister, Anne Frank, aged 15, died only days later.
Their father, Otto Frank, had survived Auschwitz and was liberated by Soviet troops on January 27th, 1945.
He wouldn’t learn what had happened to his daughters until months later, when women who had been with them during their final days told him.
The British began relief efforts within hours of entering Bergen-Belsen.
The first priority was feeding the survivors, but this created a serious problem.
>> [music] >> When people have been starving for months, giving them too much food too quickly can be deadly.
During long-term starvation, the body slowly shuts down many of its normal processes.
Suddenly introducing large amounts of food can trigger a dangerous condition now known as refeeding [music] syndrome.
This can cause heart failure, seizures, and damage to vital organs.
In the first days after liberation, some British soldiers shared their own army rations, including meat, chocolate, and biscuits with starving prisoners.
Some of those prisoners later died because their bodies couldn’t handle the food.
British doctors quickly introduced a controlled feeding system.
They used a special skimmed milk solution.
Soon they developed what became known as the Bengal famine mixture, made from skimmed milk powder, sugar, and water.
The mixture was designed to be gentle enough for severely damaged digestive systems to process.
Even with these precautions, people continued dying in large numbers for weeks.
Within days, the British moved the 32nd casualty clearing station to Bergen-Belsen.
More medical help was urgently needed.
The British Army issued emergency requests for additional personnel.
Around 96 medical students from London were sent to the camp.
Many had not yet finished their medical training.
They were sent because there simply were not enough qualified doctors available.
Not all SS guards were removed [music] immediately.
During the first days of the handover, some remained inside the camp while the British organized control and [music] tried to prevent complete chaos.
This arrangement lasted only a short time.
Within a few days, all SS personnel [music] were arrested.
Hungarian soldiers who had helped guard the outer perimeter under German command were also detained and put to work.
During the first 2 weeks after liberation, an estimated 9,000 additional survivors died.
They had survived Bergen-Belsen itself, but their bodies were too damaged to survive the rescue.
On April 17th, 1945, just 2 days after British troops entered Bergen-Belsen, BBC war correspondent Richard Dimbleby recorded a radio report from inside the camp.
It was the most detailed description any journalist had produced up to that point.
Dimbleby described the piles of corpses.
He described the bodies of children.
He described survivors who were so thin that their bones pushed visibly through their skin.
He spoke about the smell, the silence, and the enormous scale of the disaster.
At points during the recording, his voice broke with emotion.
When the report reached BBC executives, some refused to air it.
They believed the descriptions were too horrific to be true and suspected Dimbleby had exaggerated what he saw.
He threatened to resign if the report was not broadcast.
On April 19th, 1945, the BBC finally aired it.
Millions of people across Britain heard the report.
For many listeners, it was the first detailed account of what Nazi concentration camps actually looked like.
Many later said it changed how they viewed the war.
It was no longer just a conflict about territory, governments, or military victories.
It had become something much [music] darker that many people struggled to put into words.
Photographs and film footage soon followed.
The British Army Film and Photographic Unit was present from the first days after liberation.
Cameramen, including Sergeant Mike Lewis, recorded everything they could.
SS guards were filmed carrying bodies to burial pits.
The footage was later shown in cinemas across Britain, [music] the United States, and eventually Germany.
American radio journalist Edward R.
Murrow also visited Bergen-Belsen and reported what he saw to audiences in the United States.
Murrow had covered the war throughout Europe and had witnessed many major events.
Even so, Bergen-Belsen became one of the most powerful and disturbing stories of his career.
British military leaders also made a deliberate decision to bring German civilians from nearby towns into the camp.
On April 24th, 1945, residents from the town of Bergen were taken through the site.
They walked past mass graves and saw the evidence of what had been happening only a few miles from their homes.
Dealing with the 13,000 unburied bodies scattered across Bergen-Belsen became a major military operation on its own.
The camp was still in the middle of a typhus epidemic, and every day that the bodies remained exposed increased the risk of further disease.
At first, British troops tried to bury the dead individually.
It quickly became clear that this was not possible.
There were simply too many bodies, and time was running out.
The only practical solution was to use mass graves.
SS prisoners, including former camp guards, were ordered to collect the bodies and carry them to the burial pits.
The British deliberately filmed the entire process.
The footage was meant to serve as evidence of what had happened and as a permanent public record.
Hungarian soldiers who’d served as guards around the camp perimeter under German command were also assigned to body carrying duties.
British soldiers supervised the work, but they could not avoid involvement themselves.
The operation required constant organization, medical supervision, record keeping, coordination, bringing both officers and enlisted men into daily contact with the camp.
By April 28th, 1945, just 13 days after the liberation, all of the unburied bodies had been placed in graves.
At the same time, thousands of survivors continued to die from disease and starvation-related complications.
The barracks then became the next major problem.
They were heavily infested with lice carrying typhus.
British authorities concluded that disinfecting them was impossible.
The decision was made to destroy them completely.
[music] Between late April and May 21st, 1945, every wooden barrack at Bergen-Belsen was burned down.
On May 21st, a British officer set fire to the last remaining barrack.
A sign was then placed nearby.
It read, “This is the site of the infamous Belsen concentration [music] camp.
10,000 unburied dead were found here.
Another 13,000 have since died.
All of them victims of the German new order in Europe and an example of Nazi culture.
” The final barrack burned to the ground.
The sign remained.
After the liberation, a displaced persons camp, often called a DP camp, was established at Hohne barracks.
It became the largest DP camp in the British occupation zone.
At its peak in 1945, around 12,000 survivors lived there.
The survivors came from all across Nazi-occupied Europe.
They spoke Yiddish, Polish, Hungarian, German, Czech, Dutch, and many other languages.
They had lost parents, spouses, children, siblings, and entire extended families.
Very few had homes they could realistically return to.
Even when their houses still existed, the people who had once lived there were often dead.
And in many cases, other families had already moved in.
In September 1945, survivors organized themselves and created the Central Committee of Liberated Jews in the British Zone.
The committee helped rebuild community life.
It ran schools, organized religious services, published a Yiddish newspaper called Unser Shtimme, meaning our voice, and collected testimonies from survivors.
From the beginning, many understood that what had happened needed to be recorded while witnesses were still alive.
Many survivors attempted to return to their countries of origin.
Many quickly discovered that returning was not possible.
In Poland, for example, some Jewish survivors faced hostility and violence, even after the war had ended.
On July 4th, 1946, more than a year after Germany’s surrender, 42 Jewish survivors were murdered by local residents in the town of Kielce.
Events like this made it clear to many that [music] they could not safely rebuild their lives where they had once lived.
The Bergen-Belsen DP [music] camp remained open until 1950.
Some survivors spent 5 years living in displaced persons camps before finally finding a permanent place to call home.
Before the summer of 1945 ended, British investigators had gathered enough evidence to begin prosecutions.
The Belsen trial, officially known as the trial of Josef Kramer and 44 others, opened on September 17th, 1945 in the German city of Lüneburg.
It was one of the first major Allied war crimes trials after the Second World War.
45 defendants appeared in court.
They included SS officers, female SS guards, known as Aufseherinnen, and a small number of prisoner functionaries called Kapos, who had taken part in violence against fellow prisoners.
Josef Kramer faced charges for his actions at both Bergen-Belsen and Auschwitz-Birkenau.
During the trial, Kramer argued that he’d simply followed orders, and that the worsening conditions were beyond his control.
The judges weren’t convinced.
Another defendant who attracted major attention was Irma Grese.
She was only 21 years old when arrested.
Grese had served as a senior female guard at both Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen.
Survivors testified that she beat prisoners, used dogs to attack them, and helped select women who would be sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
Throughout the trial, she remained calm, denied the most serious accusations, and showed no visible signs of remorse.
The trial ended on November 17th, 1945.
11 defendants received death sentences, including Kramer and Grese.
14 others received prison terms ranging from 1 year to life imprisonment.
19 defendants were acquitted.
The executions took place on December 13th, 1945 at Hameln prison.
The hangman was Albert Pierrepoint, Britain’s official executioner, who would later carry out many of death sentences handed down after the Nuremberg trials.
Irma Grese was 22 years old when she walked to the gallows.
At her own request, she was hanged without a blindfold.
Kramer followed shortly afterward.
11 ropes, 11 trapdoors opened.
In a single morning, the sentences were carried out.
The exact number of people who died at Bergen-Belsen will never be known.
During the final weeks of the war, the SS destroyed many [music] records, and large numbers of prisoners were never officially registered after arriving at the camp.
Based on post-war research, historians estimate that between 50 [music] and 70,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen between 1940 and 1945.
[music] The death rate rose dramatically as the camp collapsed.
>> [snorts] >> Around 5,000 people died in January 1945, 7,000 in February, in March alone, roughly 8,100 people died.
These numbers show how quickly conditions spiraled out of control >> [music] >> as overcrowding increased and food, water, and medical care virtually disappeared.
[music] Children were among the victims.
Historians believe that thousands of children under the age of 14 died at Bergen-Belsen.
Many arrived with parents or guardians who died before they [music] did.
Of the roughly 60,000 prisoners found alive when the British arrived on April 15th, around 14,000 died in the weeks that followed despite emergency medical treatment.
In other words, one out of every four survivors did not live long enough to see the end of May.
Today, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial contains mass graves holding the remains of more than 70,000 people.
Most of those [music] buried there have no known grave marker.
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