Visit the historic camp site
The historic camp site is freely accessible.
There are two ways to reach the historic camp grounds: from the car park via Anne Frank Square or via the stone path between the two parts of the Documentation Centre to a platform. There, two relief models provide information about the buildings of the prisoner-of-war and concentration camp. They are located on the former camp corridor.
The site features an information system with explanations: along the edges of the corridor, parallel to the former main camp road, nine relief models explain the individual parts of the camp. Spread across the site, 17 information steles with short texts and photographs provide information about the history of the camp and individual buildings.
Graves
The victims of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp who died in the weeks before and immediately after liberation are buried in 14 mass graves and 15 individual graves. When British troops arrived at the camp on 15 April 1945, they found more than 10,000 unburied bodies, which they buried in mass graves on the camp grounds in great haste due to the risk of epidemics.
Most of these graves are located in the western part of the former camp area, not far from the obelisk and the inscription wall. The graves took on their current form in the 1960s with a low sandstone wall surrounding them.
About 600 metres from the former camp grounds is the cemetery of the former Bergen-Belsen prisoner-of-war camp. Between 1941 and 1945, about 20,000 dead were buried there.
Monuments and memorial signs
A large number of memorials from different years and in various forms commemorate the dead of the concentration camp. To this day, new memorials are constantly being added.
The first collective memorial, the Jewish memorial, was erected by survivors in the autumn of 1945. The original wooden memorial was replaced by a stone one on the first anniversary of the liberation. Nearby are numerous individual memorial stones, including the stone for the sisters Anne and Margot Frank. Survivors from Poland consecrated a large wooden high cross in November 1945 on the Catholic holiday of All Souls' Day. It has been renewed several times since then.
The obelisk, visible from afar, and the wall of inscriptions were erected at the instigation of the British military administration and inaugurated in November 1952. Today, the wall bears inscriptions from many countries that mourned victims in Bergen-Belsen, as well as inscriptions in Yiddish, Hebrew and Latin. In 1981, a text commemorating the murdered Sinti* was added. Further inscriptions were added in the form of bronze plaques.
In 2000, the ‘House of Silence’ was erected next to the mass graves, but outside the former camp boundaries, as a walk-in memorial.
Excavations
Remains of camp buildings, such as floors and foundations, fortifications of paths, fire water basins and latrine shafts, have been preserved in several places on the site. Most of them are located in the eastern part of the camp area. In the landscaped western part – near the obelisk – structural remains were removed in the post-war period.
In the 1990s, youth associations in Lower Saxony began uncovering existing relics. Near the former main camp entrance on this road, the foundation walls of a disinfection building, among other things, have been preserved. These were secured and reinforced in 2016. Excavation work on barracks 9 and 10 was completed in 2024.