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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, nowadays usually called merely Belsen, was a German concentration camp in the Nazi era. It was in Lower Saxony, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was named after a nearby town called Belsen.

History

It was started in 1940 as a POW camp. Until spring 1942, about 18,000 Soviet soldiers had died of hunger, cold and disease. Later (1942) Bergen-Belsen became a concentration camp; the SS took command of it in April 1943. In March 1944 the camp was redesignated as an "Erholungslager" (= "Recovery Camp"), where prisoners of other camps too sick to work were brought. It is usually said that there were no gas chambers in Bergen-Belsen, since the mass executions took place in the camps further east (but see below); nevertheless thousands of Jews, Czechs, Poles, anti-Nazi Christians, homosexuals, and Roma and Sinti(gypsies) died in the camp. In 1945 the prisoners of other camps were brought to the front lines, since these camps were liberated by the Soviets. In overcrowded conditions disease and malnutrition caused many deaths. Mass graves were dug. Eventually, 34 female guards served at Bergen-Belsen, many of them escaping as the British neared. Prisoners said after the war that they saw SS men and women burning papers and fleeing the camp days before the troops arrived. The SS who stayed, however, wore white armbands.

Liberation and after

When the British advanced near the camp in 1945, the German army negotiated an exclusion zone around the camp to prevent the spread of typhus. Hungarian and regular German troops guarding the camp would be returned to German lines after the battle, but this did not extend to the SS. When the British 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 living prisoners were moved to a nearby German Panzer army camp. Bergen-Belsen was then burned to the ground by flamethrowers mounted on tanks because of the infestation of epidemic typhus and lice. If an account of events mentions Belsen as still inhabited weeks or months after liberation, it means that Panzer camp.

Based on records and truthful facts, as officially reported in the 1960s at Bergen Belsen in two graphic displays along side the horror pictures:

• 1940-43: The use and expansion of an existing barracks compound into a POW camp (Stalag 311). Used for Russian 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.
• Since March 1944: Used to shelter, in a separate compound, inmates from different concentration camps who had become unable to work. (There were NO gas chambers at Bergen Belsen, at Dachau, or anywhere else in concentration camps, except at extermination camps.)
• 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 were 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 large 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 were about 50,000.

A graphic display dramatically showed the progressive death rate at Bergen-Belsen during the closing months of the war:

Until December 1944 a total of 360 deaths had been recorded during the entire existence of the camp. During January 1945 a total of 800 to 1,000 deaths recorded. During February 1945 deaths totaled between 6,000 and 7,000. During March 1945 deaths increased to 18,168. During April 1945 another 18,356 inmates died.

The deaths increased rapidly towards the end of the war as German fronts collapsed and much of the country was bombed by Allied raids. During this time the Nazi government made efforts to kill and move prisoners from outlying camps such as Auschwitz closer into Germany. Rather then attempting to move the camp inmates camp officials often attempted to murder them.

There is an account that, before the main liberation, some British troops passed the camp while following orders to reach the Baltic Sea before the Russians could reach the North Sea; the troops ordered the camp authorities to behave correctly from then on, and left; but there were hundreds more executions there before the main liberation.

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, Elizabeth Volkenrath, Juana Bormann, Fritz Klein, Josef Kramer and the rest of the SS men and SS women who before served at Mittelbau Dora, Ravensbruck, Auschwitz I, II, III, and Neuengamme. Many of the female guards in fact served at tiny Gross Rosen subcamps at Neusalz, Langenleuba, and the Dora Mittelbau (Mittelbau Dora) subcamp at Gross Werther.

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' centre, a monument to the dead, and a "House of Silence" for reflection.

After the war, the name "Belsen" became proverbial and emotive for skinnyness of humans and confinement in suffering, and was often re-applied metaphorically to various situations, often casually and inappropriately.

Was there a gas chamber at Belsen?

Most people say not. But this link quotes two witness accounts that say otherwise. These accounts are, in summary:-

• Moshe Peer. French Jew. Born in France in 1932 or 1933. Arrested in 1942 at age 9. Sent to Belsen 2 years later. 6 attempts to gas him failed because (unlike the other prisoners) he was immune or very resistant to whatever gas was used. An experience even more distressing than with most reports from there. After liberation he moved to Israel where he raised 4 children. He fought in various of Israel's wars. In 1974 he moved to Montreal in Canada.
• Niall Aslen. Son of a British soldier who liberated Belsen; information via his father. The gas chamber was underground. Liberating troops demolished the gas chamber and used the resulting open pit to bury bodies in.

References

• Bergen-Belsen Memorial
• The United States' Holocaust Memorial website on Belsen
• A lengthy account of the site and its liberation

External links

• BBC Journalist Richard Dimbleby's original Radio Report from April 15.
• Belsen 60 years on, BBC.
• Belsen 60 years on, Daily Telegraph

• Nazi concentration camps