Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

In April 1943, the Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") took over the southern part of the Bergen-Belsen POW camp from the Wehrmacht and set up the "detention camp" Bergen-Belsen there. It was intended to serve as a camp for various groups of Jews who had been exempted from deportation to the death camps. The Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") and the Foreign Office intended to exchange a large number of them for Germans interned in enemy countries, foreign currency or goods. These hostages were exempted from extermination for the time being. In particular, Jews who had official immigration papers from the British mandate authority in Palestine, were citizens of Western enemy states or had held high positions in Jewish organisations were considered as "Exchange Prisoners". The prisoners also included citizens of enemy states, neutral states and states allied with the German Empire, who were not deported for foreign policy reasons.

The prisoners' living conditions were initially much better than in other concentration camps. They were allowed to take their personal luggage and wear civilian clothes, and a cultural and religious life was able to develop in secret. Numerous poems, drawings and 27 diaries have survived from the exchange camp.

As a rule, it was not individuals who were sent to the exchange camp, but entire families, even if sometimes only a single family member fulfilled the conditions for a later exchange. Between July 1943 and December 1944, at least 14,600 Jewish prisoners, including 2,750 children and young people, were deported to the Bergen-Belsen exchange camp. Here, the Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") had set up separate camp sections for the different groups of prisoners: the "Star Camp" with a large proportion of Dutch Jews, the "Hungarians' Camp", the "Special Camp" for Polish Jews and the "Neutrals' Camp" for prisoners from neutral countries.

In total, only around 2560 Jewish prisoners were released from Bergen-Belsen on various transports.

As the war progressed and the demand for labour increased, more and more concentration camp prisoners were used for forced labour in armaments production. The functions of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, which had been set up as an "exchange camp", expanded. From the end of March 1944, male prisoners from other concentration camps who were unable to work were housed in a separate area within the camp, the "Men's Camp". After their recovery, they were supposed to be transported back to the initial camps and forced to continue working. However, thousands of prisoners died in Bergen-Belsen due to illness, hunger, exhaustion and the lack of medical care.

In August 1944, another section of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was set up for female prisoners, the "Women's Camp". Between August and the end of November 1944, the Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") brought around 9,000 women and girls to this section of the camp. After a short stay, the majority of the women and girls who were able to work were deported to other camps and to three subcamps of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for forced labour.

During the first few months, the women were provisionally housed in tents in a large open area of the camp area. It was only after a storm destroyed the tents in November 1944 that they were allocated barracks. Initially, they were Polish women who had been arrested during the Warsaw uprising and in some cases deported together with their children. Later, most of them were Polish and Hungarian Jewish women who had previously been imprisoned in the Auschwitz concentration camp.

Margot and Anne Frank, who died there in March 1945, were also among the prisoners in the Women's Camp.

In the summer of 1944, the Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") began clearing camps close to the front and deporting tens of thousands of prisoners to camps further inland in Germany under catastrophic conditions. From December 1944, at least 85,000 men, women and children were deported to Bergen-Belsen on more than 100 transports and death marches. The journeys in overcrowded cattle wagons and the marches sometimes lasted several weeks.

These transports of thousands of people, which followed each other very quickly, led to the camp becoming completely overcrowded. After the "Wehrmacht" (German armed forces) had handed over the area of the existing Prisoner of War hospital to the SS in January 1945, the Women's Camp was expanded and the Men's Camp considerably enlarged. Despite this, the existing barracks were completely overcrowded after a short time. The supply situation for the prisoners was catastrophic. A typhoid and typhus epidemic broke out, which was never seriously combated by the Schutzstaffel SS. For the prisoners of the exchange camp, their initial special status no longer mattered. In the final months before the end of the war, they were subjected to the same unimaginably cruel living conditions as all the other prisoners.

At the beginning of April 1945, the Schutzstaffel SS largely evacuated the exchange camp. Around 6,700 prisoners were to be deported on three railway transports, presumably to the Theresienstadt ghetto. However, only one train reached this destination. The other two trains were liberated by US troops near Farsleben on 13 April 1945 and by Soviet troops near Tröbitz on 23 April.

At the same time, the Schutzstaffel SS sent further evacuation transports to Bergen-Belsen. At the beginning of April 1945, they housed around 15,000 newly arrived prisoners in buildings in the nearby military barracks.

After several days of ceasefire negotiations between the "Wehrmacht" (German armed forces) and the British army, British troops took over the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp without a fight on 15 April 1945. Shortly beforehand, the Schutzstaffel SS ("Protection Squadron") had destroyed the camp administration's files in order to eliminate written documentation of their crimes. The British soldiers were in no way prepared for the inferno they found when they arrived. For thousands of the at least 53,000 liberated prisoners, rescue came too late. Despite the medical aid quickly provided by the British military and various aid organisations, around 14,000 of the liberated prisoners died as a result of their imprisonment in the concentration camp by June 1945 alone.

The Schutzstaffel SS personnel that the British soldiers encountered when they took over the camp were disarmed and placed under arrest. In the days that followed, both male and female members of the Schutzstaffel SS had to dig mass graves and bury tens of thousands of bodies in the area of the former camp.

The British troops were accompanied by military photographers and cameramen whose task it was to document the conditions in Bergen-Belsen and the relief measures that were immediately initiated. Their mission lasted from the day after Liberation until June 1945, and hundreds of photographs and film recordings, as well as the photographers' notes, give an idea of the extent of the crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen. Many of these photographs were published worldwide and still characterise the memory of the Nazi concentration camps today.