Liberation of Bergen-Belsen (1945): What British Troops Found

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen took place on 15 April 1945, when British troops entered the Nazi concentration camp near Celle in northern Germany. They found about 60,000 starving and sick prisoners and thousands of unburied bodies, in the midst of a typhus epidemic.

Belsen was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz-Birkenau, but in the last months of the war it became a place of mass death from hunger and disease. The film and photographs taken by British soldiers made Belsen, for many people in Britain and beyond, the defining image of Nazi crimes.

Background

The site near the villages of Bergen and Belsen was first used from 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp, where some 20,000 Soviet prisoners died of hunger, cold and disease, mostly in 1941–1942. In 1943 the SS took over part of it as a holding camp for Jews whom the Nazi regime hoped to exchange for German civilians interned abroad or for money. A few hundred were actually released through such exchanges.

From 1944 the camp’s character changed. It received sick prisoners from other camps, and in December 1944 Josef Kramer, previously at Auschwitz-Birkenau, became commandant. As the Soviet and Western Allied armies advanced, the SS evacuated camps in the east and centre of Germany, driving prisoners on death marches and in open railway wagons. Tens of thousands were sent to Belsen.

The camp’s population rose from about 15,000 in December 1944 to around 60,000 by April 1945, with more held in nearby barracks. There was almost no food, little water and no sanitation. Typhus, spread by lice, along with dysentery and tuberculosis, killed tens of thousands in the first months of 1945. Among the victims were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, whose story is told through the Secret Annex in Amsterdam.

The truce and liberation

By April 1945 the British Second Army was advancing across Lower Saxony. Fearing the spread of typhus, local German commanders approached the British on 12 April and negotiated a truce that made the area around the camp a neutral zone. SS guards were to leave, while Hungarian and German troops stayed to keep order until handover.

On 15 April units of the British 11th Armoured Division arrived. One of the first officers to enter was Captain Derrick Sington, commanding a loudspeaker unit that announced the liberation to the prisoners. Brigadier Glyn Hughes, deputy director of medical services of the British Second Army, arrived soon after and took charge of the relief effort. Kramer was arrested.

What the British found

The soldiers found about 13,000 unburied bodies in the camp and its huts, and survivors so weakened that many could not walk or eat. Prisoners were packed into barracks, often without bunks, in conditions of extreme filth. Sington and others described the shock of seeing the scale of death in a single place.

On 19 April, the BBC broadcast a report by the war correspondent Richard Dimbleby, who had entered the camp. His account was so harrowing that the BBC at first hesitated to air it until it could be confirmed by newspaper reports. It became one of the most famous broadcasts of the war.

The relief effort

The British faced a medical emergency on a vast scale. They brought in water, food and medical supplies, and set up a hospital in the nearby Wehrmacht barracks at Hohne. Survivors were moved there in stages, washed and deloused with DDT powder. Former SS guards were made to bury the dead in mass graves, and bulldozers were used when the number of bodies was too great.

Feeding the starving was itself dangerous, as rich army rations could kill people whose bodies had wasted away. Doctors experimented with special diets. In May, about 95 volunteer medical students from London hospitals arrived to help care for patients.

Despite these efforts, about 13,000 former prisoners died in the weeks after liberation. On 21 May 1945 British troops burned the last of the infested huts with flamethrowers in a formal ceremony.

The survivors

The prisoners at Belsen came from across Europe. Many were Jews from Poland, Hungary, the Netherlands, Greece and elsewhere, but there were also political prisoners, Soviet and Polish forced labourers, Roma and others. A large number were women, many of whom had been moved from Auschwitz and other camps in the east during the winter of 1944–1945.

For survivors, liberation did not mean an end to suffering. Many were too weak to recover, and others had lost their entire families. Some refused to leave their huts out of fear, or hoarded food after years of starvation. Relief workers, including British Red Cross teams and Jewish welfare organisations, helped them trace relatives and rebuild documents.

Survivors also began organising themselves. Rabbi Leslie Hardman, a British army chaplain who arrived days after liberation, held services and helped care for the sick and dying. In the following months a Jewish committee led by the survivor Josef Rosensaft formed to represent residents to the British authorities.

Key people

Josef Kramer was commandant of the camp from December 1944. The press called him the “Beast of Belsen”. He was tried and executed in December 1945.

Brigadier Glyn Hughes directed the medical relief and later gave evidence at the Belsen trial. Derrick Sington wrote one of the first accounts of the liberation, Belsen Uncovered (1946). Richard Dimbleby’s BBC report brought the camp to the attention of the British public.

Filmed evidence and justice

The British Army Film and Photographic Unit recorded conditions in detail, and the footage was used in newsreels, as evidence in trials and in a planned documentary on the camps. That film, produced under Sidney Bernstein with Alfred Hitchcock as an adviser, was shelved in 1945 and only completed and released by the Imperial War Museums in 2014 as German Concentration Camps Factual Survey.

The Belsen trial opened in Lüneburg on 17 September 1945 against 45 defendants, staff from Belsen and Auschwitz. On 17 November eleven were sentenced to death, including Kramer and the guard Irma Grese, and they were hanged on 13 December 1945. The trial was one of the first major Allied war crimes trials, held before the main proceedings at Nuremberg concluded.

Legacy

After liberation, the Hohne barracks became the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp, the largest such camp for Jewish survivors in Germany. It developed schools, newspapers, theatres and political life, and many residents later emigrated to Palestine and Israel, the United States and elsewhere. The camp closed in 1950.

The former camp site is now a memorial, with mass graves marked by low mounds, a memorial obelisk erected in 1952 and a documentation centre opened in 2007. Belsen remains central to Holocaust memory in Britain, through survivors’ testimony, the work of the liberators and the images recorded in 1945.

Timeline

• 1940: A prisoner-of-war camp is established at the site.
• 1943, April: The SS sets up a holding camp for Jews intended for exchange.
• 1944, 2 December: Josef Kramer becomes commandant.
• 1945, February–March: Anne and Margot Frank die in the camp.
• 1945, 12 April: A local truce declares a neutral zone around the camp.
• 1945, 15 April: British troops of the 11th Armoured Division enter the camp.
• 1945, 19 April: The BBC broadcasts Richard Dimbleby’s report.
• 1945, 21 May: The last huts are burned.
• 1945, 17 September – 17 November: The Belsen trial is held in Lüneburg.

Why it matters

The liberation of Bergen-Belsen forced the world to confront the reality of Nazi camps. The evidence gathered there was used to prosecute perpetrators, shaped how the Holocaust was understood in the West, and continues to inform the way the genocide is taught and remembered, building on knowledge of decisions such as the Wannsee Conference.