Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

In April 1943, the SS took over the southern section of the Bergen-Belsen POW camp from the Wehrmacht and established the Bergen-Belsen ‘detention camp’ (Aufenthaltslager). This camp section held various groups of Jewish prisoners who were exempt from deportation to the extermination camps – at least for the time being. The SS and Reich Foreign office intended to exchange many of them for Germans interned by hostile countries abroad or for foreign currency or goods. Jews who had official immigration papers issued by the British mandatory authorities in Palestine, who were citizens of Western Allied states, or who had held leading positions in Jewish organizations were considered especially suitable as ‘exchange prisoners’. The prisoners in this camp section also included citizens of enemy states, neutral states, and states allied with Germany who were not deported for foreign policy reasons.

The living conditions for these prisoners were initially much better than in other concentration camps. The prisoners were allowed to bring personal luggage with them and could wear civilian clothing. They were also able to develop a cultural and religious life in secret. Numerous poems, drawings, and 27 diaries have survived from the exchange camp. 

Individuals were usually not sent to the exchange camp. Instead, entire families were held hostage there, even if only a single family member met the conditions for an eventual 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. The SS had partitioned the exchange camp into separate sub-sections for different groups of prisoners: the ‘star camp’ with a large proportion of Jews from the Netherlands, the ‘Hungarian camp’, the ‘special camp’ for Polish Jews, and the ‘neutrals camp’ for prisoners from neutral states. 

A total of only around 2,560 Jewish prisoners were ever released from Bergen-Belsen on various transports.

As the war progressed and the need for workers grew, more and more concentration camp prisoners were used as forced labourers in armaments production. While the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had been established as an ‘exchange camp’, its functions subsequently expanded. From the end of March 1944, male prisoners from other concentration camps who were no longer able to work were housed in a separate section of the camp known as the ‘men’s camp’. After recovering, these prisoners were supposed to be transported back to the camps from which they had come so they could continue to work. But thousands of prisoners instead perished in Bergen-Belsen as a consequence of disease, hunger, exhaustion, and the lack of medical care.

In August 1944, another camp section was established in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp for female prisoners. Between August and the end of November 1944, the SS imprisoned some 9,000 women and girls in this ‘women’s camp’. Most of the women and girls who were able to work were soon deported to other camps and to three satellite camps of Bergen-Belsen to perform forced labour.

During the first months, the women were provisionally housed in tents in a large open area within the women’s camp. It was only after a storm destroyed the tents in November 1944 that they were finally assigned to huts. The first prisoners were Polish women who had been arrested during the Warsaw Uprising, some of whom had been deported together with their children. Most of the later prisoners were Polish and Hungarian Jewish women who had previously been imprisoned in Auschwitz. 

Two of the prisoners in the women’s camp were Margot and Anne Frank, both of whom died there in March 1945.

In the summer of 1944, the SS began clearing the camps near the front and deporting tens of thousands of prisoners to camps deeper in the German interior. Starting in December 1944, at least 85,000 men, women, and children were sent to Bergen-Belsen on more than 100 transports and death marches. These journeys took place under dire conditions. The prisoners sometimes had to walk or travel in overcrowded cattle cars for weeks on end.

As thousands of people arrived in Bergen-Belsen on transports which followed in quick succession, the camp soon became completely overcrowded. In January 1945, the camp section that the Wehrmacht had been using as a POW hospital was handed over entirely to the SS. The SS then expanded the women’s camp and significantly enlarged the men’s camp as well. Despite this, the camp’s huts were filled beyond capacity within a short period of time. The prisoners also faced a catastrophic lack of food. Epidemics of typhus and typhoid broke out which the SS never seriously tried to contain. The special status initially enjoyed by the prisoners in the exchange camp no longer protected them, and in the last months of the war, these prisoners were subjected to the same unimaginably horrific living conditions as all other prisoners. 

At the start of April 1945, the SS largely cleared the exchange camp. Around 6,700 prisoners were supposed to be transported on three trains, probably to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Only one train actually reached its destination, however. The other two trains were liberated on 13 April 1945 near Farsleben by US soldiers and on 23 April near Tröbitz by Soviet troops. 

At the same time, the SS continued directing clearance transports to Bergen-Belsen. At the start of April 1945, some 15,000 newly arrived prisoners were housed in buildings in the nearby Wehrmacht barracks.

Following several days of ceasefire negotiations between the Wehrmacht and the British Army, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was handed over to British troops without a fight on 15 April 1945. A short time before, the SS had destroyed the camp’s administrative files to eliminate all written evidence of its crimes. The British soldiers were entirely unprepared for the horrors they found in the camp when they arrived. The liberation came too late for thousands of the some 53,000 prisoners who remained in the camp. Although medical care was quickly arranged for the survivors by the British military and various aid organizations, around 14,000 liberated prisoners died from the effects of their imprisonment by June 1945. 

British soldiers disarmed and arrested the SS staff they encountered when they took over the camp. Over the following days, male and female SS members were forced to dig mass graves in the grounds of the camp and bury tens of thousands of bodies. 

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 had been immediately implemented. They worked from the day of the liberation until June 1945. Hundreds of photos and film reels, together with the photographers’ notes, hint at the scale of the crimes committed in Bergen-Belsen. Many of these photos were published worldwide and continue to shape our memory of the Nazi concentration camps to this day.