On April 15, 1945, British troops liberate the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Around 120,000 people were deported to the Lüneburg Heath under the Nazi regime, and more than 52,000 died.
by Britta Probol
Richard Dimbleby reporting from the front for the BBC during World War II. With his "War Reports" he gave radio listeners at home a better understanding of what was happening in places like Africa, Normandy or on board the Royal Air Force's fighter bombers. On April 17, 1945, he accompanies British soldiers to a concentration camp they liberated two days earlier:Bergen-Belsen.
"The day in Belsen was the most horrible day of my life"
Dimbleby is a valued and experienced war reporter, but the BBC initially collects his report from the camp. The descriptions sound too unbelievable for the transmission line, simply unbelievable. The report only runs with a 24-hour delay - Dimbleby has since threatened to quit. Across the Channel, it becomes one of the most famous in broadcast history. The last sentence sticks in your head:"That day in Belsen", according to Dimbleby, "was the most terrible day of my life."
Pictures from the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp shock the world
The name Bergen-Belsen is said to have ranked far ahead of Auschwitz in the British Holocaust perception for a long time. Because the concentration camp in Lower Saxony is the only one that was liberated by British troops. And it's one of the few that the SS hadn't cleared beforehand. What makes the Bergen-Belsen horror so relevant today are the images and audio documents from the completely overcrowded and neglected camp that British photographers and camera teams captured after the liberation. Images of emaciated people in ragged prison clothing, of living skeletons with blank eyes, and of corpses lying naked in the dust or piled up in heaps - images that shock the world public.
Handover to the British without a fight
On the afternoon of April 15, 1945, British forces from the 63rd anti-tank regiment under Colonel Taylor reached the Südheide concentration camp. This was preceded by a local armistice agreement, arranged by order of Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler, a hitherto unique event in the course of the war. A zone of 48 square kilometers around the concentration camp was neutralized and the SS withdrew three quarters of the personnel as agreed. Around 250 security guards fled unmolested, only around 50 men from the administration and 30 female guards stayed behind, including camp commander SS Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef Kramer. His former sphere of activity had been Auschwitz-Birkenau. German infantry and a Hungarian regiment - with white armbands - replaced the SS guards. According to the agreement, after the surrender, these soldiers were to withdraw freely to the German lines.
It remains unclear what prompted Himmler to order the surrender without a fight. However, the risk of epidemics apparently played a key role. Dysentery, typhoid fever and tuberculosis were rampant among the exhausted camp inmates. Above all, a typhus epidemic has been raging for around two months, claiming more victims every day. As a result, neither a defense nor an evacuation of the camp can be thought of.
Concentration camp inmates too weak to cheer
When Captain Derrick Sington, leader of a British propaganda unit, announces its takeover by the English via loudspeaker truck in the camp, he is initially prepared for rejoicing and not for "the only half-believing cheers of these almost lost men. The majority of the prisoners who remained alive ", the Jewess Lola Fischel once recalled, "did not hear about the long-awaited liberation." Many are apathetic with hunger or dulled by the daily horror. "We had lived surrounded by dirt and death for so long that we hardly noticed it anymore," explains Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, who came to Bergen-Belsen from Auschwitz a few months before the end of the war." For the later co-founder of the English Chamber Orchestra, who survived as a cellist in the Auschwitz girls' orchestra, the piled-up corpses in Bergen-Belsen "were part of the landscape, so to speak". Only a few days before the British arrived, she and her sister had to drag the deceased across the camp into a mass grave on orders from the SS.
The great extermination in Belsen begins in January 1945 with about 1,000 dead, in February already 7,000, in March another 18,000. The small crematorium is no longer sufficient to burn all the corpses. What turned Bergen-Belsen into an inferno in the last months of the war was the complete overcrowding - coupled with the collapse or the deliberate neglect of the supply systems. Built in 1943 as the youngest concentration camp in the Reich on the site of a former prisoner of war camp, Bergen-Belsen was initially intended as a "residence camp" for around 10,000 Jews, whom Himmler wanted to exchange for Germans captured abroad. However, this plan does not work - only 357 Jews are released through an exchange.
Anne Frank:From Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen
The Jewish girl Anne Frank died a few weeks before the camp was liberated.The situation in the camp worsened from August 1944, when Belsen was expanded to include a tent camp for female prisoners deported from Auschwitz-Birkenau. Among them is Anne Frank, who after her death became known around the world for her diaries. From January 1945, Bergen-Belsen functioned as a reception camp for the evacuation of the concentration camps near the front. It became the destination of death marches and had to accommodate further transports almost every day. On the day of liberation, 60,000 prisoners crowd into the tents and barracks.
Hunger, dirt, urgent confinement - and typhus
The sanitary conditions in the camp are already catastrophic at this point. The camp management did not create additional washrooms and latrines for the growing number of prisoners, some of the existing ones no longer work. There is not a toilet or a single water tap in a segregated storage area with almost 10,000 inmates. In retrospect, many prisoners who had to endure several concentration camps and ended up in Bergen-Belsen unanimously called it "the dirtiest of all camps". The delousing station, which was defective from the end of 1944, is no longer repaired and the vermin spread explosively. With the lice comes the typhus. This plague accounts for most of the casualties in the camp and, if left untreated, often leads to death in weakened individuals.
The British - overwhelmed liberators
"It would be wrong to think that everything changed immediately after the first English tank rolled into camp," recalls Anita Lasker-Wallfisch. When the British arrive, they face an enormous organizational and logistical task. Food and medicine have to be procured and the water supply has to be restored. Not everything goes smoothly in the first days after the liberation. "Unfortunately," says Captain Sington, "the first food distributed by the English - boiled together, brown bread and powdered milk - was little suited to the stomachs of those suffering from dysentery or starving." The emaciated bodies require bland diets, which only arrive days later.
The dying continues even after the liberation
On April 18, British field ambulances evacuate the first 500 typhus patients to an improvised hospital. By the end of May, all survivors will be transferred to the nearby Wehrmacht barracks. Nevertheless, around 9,000 camp inmates die by the end of April, and another 4,000 in May and June as a result of their imprisonment.
In total, more than 52,000 people died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Not a single one of the camp's barracks remains. Because of the risk of epidemics, they are successively torn down after their evacuation, the last one being set on fire with a flamethrower on May 21.
First war crimes trial:Bergen-Belsen trial in Lüneburg
Warden Irma Grese and camp manager Josef Kramer were later sentenced to death and hanged.Five months after the liberation, the first war crimes trial of the victorious powers begins with worldwide sympathy. From September 17, 33 members of the SS and eleven kapos - prisoners with a supervisory function - have to answer before a British military court. Hundreds of journalists traveled to Lüneburg in Lower Saxony to report on the trial. A "lesson of correct justice", said Axel Eggebrecht, one of the three accredited German press people.
The so-called Belsen trial ends with eleven death sentences. On December 10, 1945, camp commandant Josef Kramer, notorious as "the beast of Belsen", and the notorious camp guard Irma Grese were hanged in Hameln.
Bergen-Belsen memorial opened in 1952
On the grounds of the concentration camp in the Lüneburg Heath, a memorial has been commemorating the suffering of the prisoners since 1952 - it is the first to be set up at a concentration camp and has been continuously expanded over the decades.
Digital commemoration in Corona times
The large commemoration event with survivors on the occasion of the 75th anniversary of liberation last year was initially postponed by a year due to the corona pandemic. With a much smaller event, including with Lower Saxony's Prime Minister Stephan Weil (SPD), the victims were remembered. Also this year there could be no public presence commemoration. The memorial instead held a digital ceremony on its website on April 15. Young people, among others, report there about their meetings with survivors.
"In Belsen you just died"
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch is one of the survivors who would have come to Bergen-Belsen on the 75th anniversary of the liberation. "Only those who were here in Belsen at the time can really know what we survivors are talking about, nothing but corpses, corpses, corpses," writes the 94-year-old in her speech manuscript for the postponed commemoration. "I'm often asked if Belsen was better than Auschwitz. Belsen was simply different, Belsen was unique, it wasn't an extermination camp, there were no gas chambers here, in Belsen you just died."