Bergen-Belsen

Bergen-Belsen, Nazi German concentration camp near the villages of Bergen and Belsen, about 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Celle, Germany. It was established in 1943 on part of the site of a prisoner-of-war camp and was originally intended as a detention camp for Jews who were to be exchanged for Germans in Allied territory.

There were actually five satellite camps: a prison camp, a special camp for Jews holding papers from South American countries, a “star camp”—so called because prisoners had to wear yellow stars of David but not uniforms—for prisoners to be exchanged with the West, a camp for Jews holding citizenship papers from a neutral country, and a camp that housed 1,684 Jews deported from Hungary on a special train promised to Hungarian Jewish leader Rezső Rudolf (Israel) Kasztner. This last group was eventually destined for Switzerland.

After the death marches of the winter of 1945—forced evacuations of prisoners from concentration and extermination camps in the east—conditions at Bergen-Belsen deteriorated rapidly, and its death toll climbed. Originally it was designed for 10,000 prisoners but, by war’s end, with the arrival of Jewish prisoners forcibly evacuated from Auschwitz and other eastern camps, it held about 60,000 people, most of whom lacked any food or shelter. Although Bergen-Belsen contained no gas chambers, more than 35,000 people died between January and mid-April 1945 from starvation, overwork, disease, and, toward the war’s end, a typhus epidemic brought about by some of the most squalid, fetid living conditions of any of Germany’s camps. Anne Frank, whose wartime diary later became world-famous, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945.

Some 28,000 prisoners died of disease and other causes in the weeks after the British army liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. The British were forced to bury thousands of corpses in mass graves hastily excavated on the site. Bergen-Belsen was the first major Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by the Western Allies, and its horrors gained instant notoriety. Forty-eight members of the camp staff were tried and 11 of them, including SS commandant Josef Kramer, the “Beast of Belsen,” were sentenced to death by a British military court and hanged. After the war, Bergen-Belsen became the largest displaced-person camp in Germany. Most of its residents later immigrated to Israel.