Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Disambiguation: There was also a displaced persons camp known as Bergen-Belsen established by British forces near the concentration camp. See Bergen-Belsen DP camp.
Bergen-Belsen, (or Belsen) was a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Between 1943 and 1945 an estimated 50,000 European civilians died there. A memorial and an exhibition centre exist on the site now.
History
Belsen was created in 1940 as a POW camp. Between this time and the spring of 1942 about 18,000 Soviet soldiers died of hunger, cold and disease. In 1942 Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp; it was placed under SS command in April 1943. In March 1944 the camp was redesignated as an "Erholungslager" ("Recovery Camp"), [1] where prisoners from other camps too sick to work were brought. There were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, since the mass executions took place in the camps further east. Nevertheless thousands of Jews, Czechs, Poles, anti-Nazi Christians, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti (gypsies) died in the camp.
In 1945 the Nazis moved prisoners from eastern camps to Belsen as the Soviet forces advanced. The resulting overcrowding led to a vast increase in deaths from disease and malnutrition. The bodies of these prisoners were buried in mass graves.
At least 50,000 people died in Bergen-Belsen before liberation, among them Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who died there in March 1945. An estimated 13,000 more died of illness and malnutrition shortly after liberation. Although the camp was burned to the ground, the site is today open to the public, featuring a visitors' center, a monument to the dead, [2] and a "House of Silence" for reflection.
Liberation and after
When the British advanced near the camp in 1945, the German army negotiated an exclusion zone around it to prevent the spread of typhus. Hungarian and regular German troops guarding the camp returned to German lines after the engagement. Some SS guards also fled the camp; however, a number remained wearing white armbands as a sign of surrender.
When British troops liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, they found thousands of bodies unburied; they forced the remaining SS personnel to bury these, and ordered local German civilians to assist. The surviving prisoners were moved to a nearby German Panzer army camp. Bergen-Belsen was then burned to the ground by flamethrowers because of a typhus epidemic and louse infestation. Subsequent accounts of Belsen after this time refer to events at the nearby army camp.
Many of the former SS staff that survived the typhus epidemic were tried by the British at the Belsen Trial. One defendant, Klara Opitz, lost all of her hair from the disease. At the trial, the world got its first view of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Juana Bormann, Fritz Klein, Josef Kramer and the rest of the SS men and women who before served at Mittelbau Dora, Ravensbrück, Auschwitz I, II, III, and Neuengamme. Many of the female guards had served at tiny Gross Rosen subcamps at Neusalz, Langenleuba, and the Dora Mittelbau (Mittelbau Dora) subcamp at Gross Werther.
Michael Bentine wrote this on his encounter with Belsen:
We were headed for an airstrip outside Celle, a small town, just north of Hanover. We had barely cranked to a halt and started to set up the ‘ops’ tent, when the Typhoons thundered into the circuit and broke formation for their approach. As they landed on the hastily repaired strip – a ‘Jock’ doctor raced up to us in his jeep. ‘Got any medical orderlies?’ he shouted above the roar of the aircraft engines. ‘Any K rations or vitaminised chocolate?’ ‘What’s up?’ I asked for I could see his face was grey with shock. ‘Concentration camp up the road,’ he said shakily, lighting a cigarette. ‘It’s dreadful - just dreadful.’ He threw the cigarette away untouched. ‘I’ve never seen anything so awful in my life. You just won’t believe it till you see it – for God’s sake come and help them!’ ‘What’s it called?’ I asked, reaching for the operations map to mark the concentration camp safely out of the danger area near the bomb line. ‘Belsen,’ he said, simply.
Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I’ve tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won’t come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.
After VE. Day I flew up to Denmark with Kelly, a West Indian pilot who was a close friend. As we climbed over Belsen, we saw the flame-throwing Bren carriers trundling through the camp – burning it to the ground. Our light ME. 108 rocked in the superheated air, as we sped above the curling smoke, and Kelly had the last words on it. ‘Thank Christ for that,’ he said, fervently. And his words sounded like a benediction.
Timeline of events
- 1940-43: The use and expansion of an existing barracks compound into a POW camp (Stalag 311). Used for Soviet POWs since the summer of 1941. Mass dying during a typhus epidemic.
- April 1943: The camp was turned over to the SS and changed to ‘Aufenthaltslager Bergen-Belsen’ for the encampment of several thousand Jews who, if possible, were to be exchanged for Germans held by the Allies.
- March 1944 onwards: Used to shelter, in a separate compound, inmates from different concentration camps who had become unable to work.
- Oct/Nov 1944: A temporary expansion of one part of the camp, for the arrival of 8,000 women from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
- Dec. 1944 (four months before the camp was liberated): completion of the change-over of Bergen-Belsen into a concentration camp. SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, previously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, became the new camp commander. The number of inmates in the camp on December 1st, 1944 was 15,257.
- Since January 1945: Numerous arrivals at Bergen-Belsen of rail transports from concentration camps near the front lines. The start of the Infernos. Intolerably overcrowded conditions at the camp. Hunger and epidemics, increasingly higher death rates.
- Number of inmates: Feb 1st 1945 - 22,000. March 1st - 41,520. April 1st - 43,042. April 15th - about 60,000.
- Number of deaths: During February 1945 - 7,000. During March - 18,168. During the first half of April - 9,000.
- April 15th 1945, the liberation of Bergen-Belsen by British troops. In spite of great efforts to help the survivors, about another 9,000 died in April. By the end of June of 1945 another 4,000 had died. The total number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen from 1943 to June 1945 was about 50,000.
References
- Bergen-Belsen Memorial
- The United States' Holocaust Memorial website on Belsen
- A lengthy account of the site and its liberation
External links
