The memorial signs
The first memorials on the former camp grounds were erected by survivors shortly after Liberation. They erected personal plaques and Memorial stones on the mass graves.
History of the memorial signs
Shortly afterwards, these were supplemented by large-format plaques that had been erected by the British Army at the former camp entrance shortly after Liberation. They provided information about the concentration camp in English and German.
In September 1945, Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) erected a temporary wooden memorial to mark the first congress of liberated Jews in the British zone. For most of the Jewish survivors, Bergen-Belsen was a place of mourning for the dead and symbolically linked to current political goals at the time. At the inauguration of the first stone memorial on the anniversary of Liberation in April 1946 on the former camp grounds, representatives of the Central Committee called for the possibility of emigration to Palestine and the establishment of a Jewish state.
Shortly after the Liberation of the concentration camp, a Polish camp committee was also formed in the DP camp with the aim, among other things, of keeping alive the memory of the murdered (non-Jewish) compatriots. On 2 November 1945, a wooden high cross was dedicated in the presence of several thousand survivors, representatives of the Vatican and the British military government.
In November 1945, the Soviet military commission dedicated a memorial to the Soviet victims of the Bergen-Belsen POW camp in the entrance area of the Bergen-Belsen Prisoner of War cemetery. In 1950, a temporary memorial from 1945 was replaced by a stone memorial with name plaques on the cemetery of the Italian military internees. After the dead were reburied in the central cemetery for Italian war victims in Hamburg-Öjendorf, it was removed in 1958.
Memorial stones are still erected by relatives in coordination with the memorial site on the former camp grounds. In addition to their function as an individual place of mourning, these stones have become increasingly important because, as part of the place of remembrance, they allow visitors to draw conclusions about the history.