Prisoners in the barracks at Belsen, April 1945
NAM 1994-04-105-8
Horror of the Holocaust: Liberation of Belsen
Bergen-Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, was the first concentration camp to be liberated by British troops, on 15 April 1945. When soldiers of the 2nd Army arrived they found the camp littered with dead and dying prisoners. Around 60,000 starving people, many suffering from typhus and dysentery, required immediate aid. Despite the best efforts of the medical services, hundreds died in the days after the liberation. In the weeks that followed, British troops buried 10,000 bodies in mass graves. An estimated 70,000 Jews, Slavs, Roma, political prisoners, gays, Jehovah’s witnesses and criminals were killed at Belsen.
Female prisoners at Belsen, 1945. NAM 1994-04-105-11
Women and girls from all over Europe are gathered together on the floor of an unsanitary hut at the Belsen camp. They are the lucky few, still alive when British troops reached the camp. Many more had already perished from disease, starvation and brutality. Among the many victims were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who both died of typhus a month before the camp’s liberation.
When British troops first arrived at Belsen on 15 April 1945 they made the SS personnel collect and bury the bodies of their victims. Eventually, the British had to resort to bulldozers to push the thousands of bodies into mass graves. Evacuation of the camp began on 21 April and the last hut was burned to the ground on 21 May 1945. German civilians living near Belsen were taken there to see what had gone on inside the camp in their name. Photographs and film taken at the camp and published in the media brought home to British people the full horror of the Nazis’ crimes.
