Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Bergen-Belsen | |
---|---|
SS-Totenkopfverbande | |
Commandant | List
|
Original use | Prisoner-of-war camp |
Operational | 1940–1945 |
Inmates | Jews, Poles, Soviets, Dutch, Czechs, Germans, Austrians |
Number of inmates | 120,000 |
Killed | 70,000 or more |
Liberated by | United Kingdom and Canada, April 15, 1945 |
Notable inmates | Anne and Margot Frank |
Website | bergen-belsen |
Bergen-Belsen (pronounced
After 1945, the name was applied to the
The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, by the British 11th Armoured Division.[4] The soldiers discovered approximately 60,000 prisoners inside, most of them half-starved and seriously ill,[5] and another 13,000 corpses lying around the camp unburied.[4] A memorial with an exhibition hall currently stands at the site.
Operation
Prisoner of war camp
In 1935, the Wehrmacht began to build a large military complex close to the village of Belsen, a part of the town of Bergen, in what was then the Province of Hanover.[1] This became the largest military training area in Germany of the time and was used for armoured vehicle training.[1] The barracks were finished in 1937. The camp has been in continuous operation since then and is today known as Bergen-Hohne Training Area. It is used by the NATO armed forces.
The workers who constructed the original buildings were housed in camps near
The camp of huts near Fallingbostel became known as
In the summer of 1943, Stalag XI-C (311) was dissolved and Bergen-Belsen became a branch camp of Stalag XI-B. It served as the hospital for all Soviet POWs in the region until January 1945. Other inmates/patients were Italian military internees from August 1944 and, following the suppression of the
Concentration camp
In April 1943, a part of the Bergen-Belsen camp was taken over by the SS Economic-Administration Main Office (SS Wirtschafts-Verwaltungshauptamt; WVHA). It thus became part of the
In March 1944, part of the camp was redesignated as an Erholungslager ("recovery camp"),[citation needed] where prisoners too sick to work were brought from other concentration camps. They were in Belsen supposedly to recover and then return to their original camps and resume work, but many of them died in Belsen of disease, starvation, exhaustion and lack of medical attention.[11]
In August 1944, a new section was created and this became the so-called "women's camp". By November 1944 this camp received around 9,000 women and young girls. Most of those who were able to work stayed only for a short while and were then sent on to other concentration camps or slave-labour camps. The first women interned there were Poles, arrested after the failed Warsaw Uprising. Others were Jewish women from Poland or Hungary, transferred from Auschwitz.[11] Margot and Anne Frank died there in February or March 1945.[12]
More prisoners
In December 1944 SS-
Außenlager (satellite camps)
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp had three satellite camps.[14] These were at regional armament works. Around 2,000 female concentration camp prisoners were forced to work there. Those who were too weak or sick to continue with their work were brought to Bergen-Belsen.[10]: 204–205
Außenlager Bomlitz-Benefeld at
Außenlager Hambühren-Ovelgönne (Lager III, Waldeslust) at Hambühren south of Winsen was in use from August 23, 1944, to February 4, 1945. It was an abandoned potash mine, now intended as an underground production site for Bremen plane manufacturer Focke-Wulf. Around 400 prisoners, mostly female Polish or Hungarian Jews, were forced to prepare the facility and to help lay train tracks to it. This was done for the company Hochtief.[10]: 204
Außenlager Unterlüß-Altensothrieth (Tannenberglager) east of Bergen was in use from late August 1944 to April 13, 1945. It was located at Unterlüß, where the Rheinmetall-Borsig AG had a large test site. Up to 900 female Polish, Hungarian, Romanian, Yugoslavian and Czech Jews had to clear forest, do construction work or work in munitions production.[10]: 204
Prisoners were guarded by SS staff and received no wages for their work. The companies instead reimbursed the SS for the labour supplied. Wage taxes were also levied by local authorities.[10]: 204–205
Treatment of prisoners and deaths in the camp
Current estimates put the number of prisoners who passed through the concentration camp during its period of operation from 1943 to 1945 at around 120,000. Due to the destruction of the camp's files by the SS, not even half of them, around 55,000, are known by name.[10]: 269 As mentioned above, treatment of prisoners by the SS varied between individual sections of the camp, with the inmates of the exchange camp generally being better treated than other prisoners, at least initially. However, in October 1943 the SS selected 1,800 men and women from the Sonderlager ("special camp"), Jews from Poland who held passports from Latin American countries. Since the governments of these nations mostly refused to honour the passports, these people had lost their value to the regime. Under the pretext of sending them to a fictitious "Lager Bergau", the SS had them transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where they were sent directly to the gas chambers and murdered. In February and May 1944 another 350 prisoners from the "special camp" were sent to Auschwitz. Thus, out of the total of 14,600 prisoners in the exchange camp, at least 3,550 died, more than 1,400 of them at Belsen, and around 2,150 at Auschwitz.[10]: 187
In the Männerlager (the male section of the "recovery camp"), inmates suffered even more from lack of care, malnourishment, disease and mistreatment by the guards. Thousands of them died. In the summer of 1944, at least 200 men were murdered by orders of the SS by being injected with phenol.[10]: 196
There were no
The rate at which inmates died at Belsen accelerated notably after the mass transport of prisoners from other camps began in December 1944. From 1943 to the end of 1944 around 3,100 died. From January to mid-April 1945 this rose to around 35,000. Another 14,000 died after liberation between April 15 and the end of June 1945, in the Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp under British authority.[10]: 233
Deaths at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp December 1944 to April 15, 1945[10]: 232–233 | ||
---|---|---|
December 1944 | at least 360 | |
January 1945 | around 1,200 | |
February 1945 | around 6,400 | |
March 1945 | at least 18,168 | |
April 1945 | around 10,000 |
After the war, there were allegations that the camp (or possibly a section of it), was "of a privileged nature", compared to others. A lawsuit filed by the Jewish community in Thessaloniki against 55 alleged collaborators claims that 53 of them were sent to Bergen-Belsen "as a special favor" granted by the Germans.[citation needed]
Liberation
When the British and Canadians advanced on Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the German army negotiated a truce and exclusion zone around the camp to prevent the spread of typhus.
When British and Canadian troops finally entered they found over 13,000 unburied bodies and (including the satellite camps) around 60,000 inmates, most acutely sick and starving. The prisoners had been without food or water for days before the Allied arrival, partially due to Allied bombing. Immediately before and after liberation, prisoners were dying at around 500 per day, mostly from typhus.[22] The scenes that greeted British troops were described by the BBC's Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them:
...Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which... The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them ... Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live ... A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life.[23]
Initially lacking sufficient manpower, the British allowed the Hungarians to remain in charge and only commandant Kramer was arrested. Subsequently, SS and Hungarian guards shot and killed some of the starving prisoners who were trying to get their hands on food supplies from the store houses.
Over the next days the surviving prisoners were deloused and moved to a nearby German
The British forced the former SS camp personnel to help bury the thousands of dead bodies in mass graves.[25] The personnel were given starvation rations, not allowed to use gloves or other protective clothing, and were continuously shouted at and threatened to make sure that they did not stop working. Some of the bodies were so rotten that arms and legs tore away from the torso.[26] Within two months, 17 staff members had died of typhus due to being forced to handle the bodies with no protection. Another committed suicide, and three others were shot and killed by British soldiers after trying to escape.[27]
Some civil servants from Celle and
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was then burned to the ground by flamethrowing "Bren gun" carriers and Churchill Crocodile tanks because of the typhus epidemic and louse infestation.[28] As the concentration camp ceased to exist at this point, the name Belsen after this time refers to events at the Bergen-Belsen DP camp.[10]: 265
There were massive efforts to help the survivors with food and medical treatment, led by Brigadier
Two specialist teams were dispatched from Britain to deal with the feeding problem. The first, led by A. P. Meiklejohn, included 96 medical student volunteers from London teaching hospitals[29] who were later credited with significantly reducing the death rate amongst prisoners.[30] A research team led by Janet Vaughan was dispatched by the Medical Research Council to test the effectiveness of various feeding regimes.
The British troops and medical staff tried these diets to feed the prisoners, in this order:[31]
- Bully beef from Army rations. Most of the prisoners' digestive systems were in too weak a state from long-term starvation to handle such food.
- Skimmed milk. The result was a bit better, but still far from acceptable.
- Bengal Famine Mixture. This is a rice-and-sugar-based mixture which had achieved good results after the Bengal famine of 1943, but it proved less suitable to Europeans than to Bengalis because of the differences in the food to which they were accustomed.[32] Adding the common ingredient paprika to the mixture made it more palatable to these people and recovery started.
Some were too weak to even consume the Bengal Famine Mixture.
Aftermath
Legal prosecution
Many of the former SS staff who survived the typhus epidemic were tried by the British military at the
Eleven of the defendants were sentenced to death.[34] They included Kramer, Volkenrath and Klein. The executions by hanging took place on December 13, 1945, in Hamelin.[34] Fourteen defendants were acquitted (one was excluded from the trial due to illness). Of the remaining 19, one was sentenced to life in prison but he was executed for another crime. Eighteen were sentenced to prison for periods of one to 15 years; however, most of these sentences were subsequently reduced significantly on appeals or pleas for clemency.[34] By June 1955, the last of those sentenced in the Belsen trial had been released.[24]: 37 Ten other members of the Belsen personnel were tried by later military tribunals in 1946 and 1948, with five of them being executed.[34]
Denazification courts were created by the Allies to try members of the SS and other Nazi organisations. Between 1947 and 1949 these courts initiated proceedings against at least 46 former SS staff at Belsen. Around half of these were discontinued, mostly because the defendants were considered to have been forced to join the SS.[24]: 39 Those who were sentenced received prison terms of between four and 36 months or were fined. As the judges decided to count the time the defendants had spent in Allied internment towards the sentence, the terms were considered to have already been fully served.[35]
Only one trial was ever held by a German court for crimes committed at Belsen, at Jena in 1949; the defendant was acquitted. More than 200 other SS members who were at Belsen have been known by name but never had to stand trial.
Memorial
The area of the former Bergen-Belsen camp fell into neglect after the burning of the buildings and the closure of the nearby displaced persons' camp in the summer of 1950. The area reverted to heath; few traces of the camp remained. However, as early as May 1945, the British had erected large signs at the former camp site. Ex-prisoners began to set up monuments.[37] A first wooden memorial was built by Jewish DPs in September 1945, followed by one made in stone, dedicated on the first anniversary of the liberation in 1946. On November 2, 1945, a large wooden cross was dedicated as a memorial to the murdered Polish prisoners. Also by the end of 1945 the Soviets had built a memorial at the entrance to the POW cemetery. A memorial to the Italian POWs followed in 1950, but was removed when the bodies were reinterred in a Hamburg cemetery.
The British military authorities ordered the construction of a permanent memorial in September 1945 after having been lambasted by the press for the desolate state of the camp.[24]: 41 In the summer of 1946, a commission presented the design plan, which included the obelisk and memorial walls. The memorial was finally inaugurated in a large ceremony in November 1952, with the participation of Germany's president Theodor Heuss, who called on the Germans never to forget what had happened at Belsen.[24]: 41
For a long time, however, remembering Bergen-Belsen was not a political priority. Periods of attention were followed by long phases of official neglect. For much of the 1950s, Belsen "was increasingly forgotten as a place of remembrance".[37] Only after 1957 did large groups of young people visit the place where Anne Frank had died. After anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled on the Cologne synagogue over Christmas 1959, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer followed a suggestion by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress, and visited the site of a former concentration camp for the first time. In a speech at the Bergen-Belsen memorial, Adenauer assured the Jews still living in Germany that they would have the same respect and security as everyone else.[24]: 42 Afterwards, the German public saw the Belsen memorial as primarily a Jewish place of remembrance. Nevertheless, the memorial was redesigned in 1960–61. In 1966, a document centre was opened which offered a permanent exhibition on the persecution of the Jews, with a focus on events in the nearby Netherlands – where Anne Frank and her family had been arrested in 1944. This was complemented by an overview of the history of the Bergen-Belsen camp. This was the first ever permanent exhibit anywhere in Germany on the topic of Nazi crimes.[24]: 42 However, there was still no scientific personnel at the site, with only a caretaker as permanent staff. Memorial events were only organized by the survivors themselves.
In October 1979, the president of the European Parliament Simone Veil, herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, came to the memorial for a speech which focused on the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti. This was the first time that an official event in Germany acknowledged this aspect of the Nazi era.
In 1985, international attention was focused on Bergen-Belsen.[38] The camp was hastily included in Ronald Reagan's itinerary when he visited West Germany after a controversy about a visit to a cemetery where the interred included members of the Waffen SS (see Bitburg controversy). Shortly before Reagan's visit on May 5, there had been a large memorial event on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the camp's liberation, which had been attended by German president Richard von Weizsäcker and chancellor Helmut Kohl.[24]: 44 In the aftermath of these events, the parliament of Lower Saxony decided to expand the exhibition centre and to hire permanent scientific staff. In 1990, the permanent exhibition was replaced by a new version and a larger document building was opened.
Only in 2000 did the Federal Government of Germany begin to financially support the memorial. Co-financed by the state of Lower Saxony, a complete redesign was planned which was intended to be more in line with contemporary thought on exhibition design.[39] On April 15, 2005, there was a ceremony, commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation and many ex-prisoners and ex-liberating troops attended.[40][41] In October 2007, the redesigned memorial site was opened, including a large new Documentation Centre and permanent exhibition on the edge of the newly redefined camp, whose structure and layout can now be traced. Since 2009, the memorial has been receiving funding from the Federal government on an ongoing basis.[42]
The site is open to the public and includes monuments to the dead, including a successor to the wooden cross of 1945, some individual memorial stones and a "House of Silence" for reflection. In addition to the Jewish, Polish and Dutch national memorials, a memorial to eight Turkish citizens who were killed at Belsen was dedicated in December 2012.[43]
Personal accounts
- The British comedian Michael Bentine, who took part in the liberation of the camp, wrote this on his encounter with Belsen:
Millions of words have been written about these horror camps, many of them by inmates of those unbelievable places. I've tried, without success, to describe it from my own point of view, but the words won't come. To me Belsen was the ultimate blasphemy.[44]
- Memories of Anne Frank, a book written by Alison Leslie Gold on the recollections of Hannah Goslar, a friend of Anne Frank
- better source needed]
- chaplain to enter the camp, two days after its liberation, and published his account in the collective book Belsen in History and Memory.[46]
- In Bergen-Belsen 1945: A Medical Student's Journal, volunteer Michael Hargrave gives his first-hand testimony of working at the displaced persons camp after liberation.[47]
- displaced persons camp in her autobiography Inherit the Truth.[48]
- Munich Massacreat the 1972 Summer Olympics recalled:
I saw my father beaten by the SS, and I lost most of my family there... A ransom deal that the Americans attempted saved 2,000 Jews and I was one. I actually went into the gas chamber, but was reprieved. God knows why.[49]
- In his book From Belsen to Buckingham Palace Paul Oppenheimer tells of the events leading up to the internment of his whole family at the camp and their incarceration there between February 1944 and April 1945, when he was aged 14–15.[3] Following publication of the book, Oppenheimer personally talked to many groups and schools about the events he witnessed. This work was continued by his brother Rudi, who shared the experiences.[citation needed]
- Leonard Webb, British veteran from the liberation of the camp.[citation needed]
- Describing the concentration camp, Major Dick Williams, one of the first British soldiers to enter and liberate the camp, said: "It was an evil, filthy place; a hell on Earth."[50]
- Abel Herzberg wrote the diary Between Two Streams (Dutch: Tweestromenland) during his internment in Bergen-Belsen[51]
- British servicemen Denis Norden and Eric Sykes, who later became popular comedians, stumbled upon the camp in 1945 shortly after liberation; "Appalled, aghast, repelled – it is difficult to find words to express how we felt as we looked upon the degradation of some of the inmates not yet repatriated," Sykes later wrote. "They squatted in their thin, striped uniforms, unmoving bony structures who could have been anywhere between 30 and 60 years old, staring ahead with dead, hopeless eyes and incapable of feeling any relief at their deliverance."[52]
- A number of British artists depicted the aftermath of the liberation of the camp. These included Eric Taylor, Leslie Cole, Doris Zinkeisen, Mary Kessell and Edgar Ainsworth.[53]
- In his 2011 autobiography I Was a Boy in Belsen, Holocaust survivor Tomi Reichental recounts his experiences as a prisoner in the Bergen- Belsen concentration camp.[54]
- In The Dead Years - Holocaust Memoirs (ISBN 9789492371164), published by Amsterdam Publishers, survivor Joseph Schupack (1922-1989) tells about his last camp, Bergen-Belsen (pp. 173–174):
- And The Month Was May: A Memoir (ISBN 9781440140846) by Lilian Berliner The book traces the life of Lillian Berliner, from her childhood in Hungary, to the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Bergen Belsen, to her eventual liberation and resettlement in New York.
After a day’s journey, we arrived at Bergen-Belsen. This concentration camp was hopelessly overcrowded and we were not accepted. The right hand no longer knew what the left hand was doing, so we were sent to an adjoining Wehrmacht compound. As the soldiers of the Wehrmacht marched out, we moved in. The confusion was unbelievable; this time it was disorder with German perfection. We were moved into clean barracks, equipped for human beings with excellent bathrooms and clean beds stacked three on top of each other. After all we had experienced in the preceding year, this was sheer luxury. There was no mention of the usual camp rituals, no roll calls and no work, but also no food.
- CMK Parsons, a British Army chaplain and great-grandfather of British artist Tom Marshall photographed his time at the camp, including the burning of the huts.[55] His photos were published in 2015.[56]
- Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO[57]
It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for those internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tattooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.
- Belsen Uncovered by Derrick Sington (1946)[58]
The twentieth century has so far produced no more terrifying example of collective human wickedness than the Belsen Concentration Camp, a black spot which it fell to the lot of the British Army to occupy. This book is the personal story of the first British officer to enter the camp on its liberation and the last to leave, after a stay of five months. The author and two of his N.C.O.'s between them spoke five languages, so they had unrivalled opportunities for discovering what the inmates, men, women and children, experienced and felt. The evil which produced the concentration camps is fully exposed, and here too will be found a record of how the psychological and medical problems were tackled, as well as such complicated matters as supplies, welfare and rehabilitation.
- Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp - A Personal Account by Leonard Berney (former) Lt-Colonel Leonard Berney R.A. T.D. (2015)
But what should you do when faced with 60,000 dead, sick and dying people? We were in the army to fight a war and to beat the enemy. We were good at that, having been in combat for the last ten months, but none of us had any experience of dealing with the situation in Belsen and we were all more or less traumatized by the sights we had seen. I myself, although a 'senior officer', had turned 25 years of age only a few days before. Most of the men sent to deal with that human disaster were in their late teens or early twenties, even younger than I was. What we suddenly found ourselves faced with was beyond anyone's comprehension
Media
- The Relief of Belsen (2007 film)
- Frontline: "Memory of the Camps" (May 7, 1985, Season 3, Episode 18), is a 56-minute television documentary that addresses Bergen-Belsen and other Nazi concentration camps[citation needed]
- Memorandum (1965 film)
- Night Will Fall is a 2014 documentary film that includes video footage shot by British armed forces upon their liberation of Bergen-Belsen[59]
- A protagonist in the novel The Lüneburg Variation by Paolo Maurensig describes the deprivations he suffered at Bergen-Belsen, “…only then did I understand that we’d been playing for human lives, lives that in Bergen-Belsen were worth less than a pfennig, less than a handful of dried beans.’
Notable inmates
This list contains some of the notable people who were imprisoned in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. With the exception of those marked as survivors, they all died there.
- Julius Adler – a German Communist politician
- Eduard Alexander – a German Communist politician
- Alex Aronson (survived) – a Dutch aid worker executed in Ba'athist Iraq
- Judeo-Spanish language
- Hélène Berr – a French woman of Jewish ancestry who documented her life in a diary during the time of Nazi occupation of France
- Thierry de Briey – a Belgian equestrian and Belgian Resistance member
- Lagerälteste(camp elder) of the Auschwitz concentration camp
- Braulia Cánovas - (survived) Spanish Republican who fought in French Resistance as "Monique".
- Josef Čapek – a Czech artist
- Amédée Dunois – a French lawyer, journalist and politician
- Adrien d'Esclaibes d'Hust (see French article) – French city mayor, lawyer, scout leader and resistant
- Ernst Flersheim – a German Jewish art collector
- Anne and Margot Frank, who both died of typhus there in February or March 1945, shortly before the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945.[60]
- Marianne Franken – a Dutch painter
- Hanneli Goslar (survived) – a friend of Anne Frank, spoke about memories of Frank after surviving Bergen-Belsen.
- Oscar Ihlebæk – a Norwegian newspaper editor and resistance member
- Mirjam Jacobson – a Dutch painter
- Heinrich Jasper – a German politician
- Johnny & Jones, actually Nol (Arnold Siméon) van Wesel and Max (Salomon Meyer) Kannewasser – a jazz-duo
- Józef Klukowski – a Polish sculptor
- Suzanne Kohn – a French Jew born into one of France's most prominent Jewish families
- Shaul Ladany (survived) – an Israeli Olympic athlete and survivor of the Munich massacre
- Karl Landauer – a German psychoanalyst
- Rywka Lipszyc – a Polish-Jewish teenage girl who wrote a personal diary while in the Łódź Ghetto
- Augustin Malroux – a French socialist politician and member of the French Resistance
- Jean Maurice Paul Jules de Noailles – a member of the French Resistance
- Gino Parin – an Italian painter of Jewish ancestry
- Gisella Perl (survived) – a Hungarian doctor and author
- Julius Philipp – a German-born metal trader
- Yvonne Rudellat – an agent of the Special Operations Executive
- Zuzana Růžičková (survived) – a Czech harpsichordist
- Felice Schragenheim – a Jewish resistance fighter
- Benjamin Marius Telders – a professor of law at Leiden University
- national syndicalistpolitician
- Arthur Vanderpoorten – a Belgian liberal politician and minister
- Gerardus van der Wel – a Dutch long-distance runner
- Julius Wolff – a Dutch mathematician
- Uri Orlev (survived) - a Polish-Israeli children's author
See also
- Holocaust Memorial Day
- Holocaust memorial landscapes in Germany
- List of Nazi concentration camps
- Alan Moore (war artist)
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- ^ Eric Sterling, "Between Two Streams: A Diary from Bergen-Belsen Review", A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust, 1999. Retrieved on 15 February 2015.
- ^ "How Denis Norden stumbled upon concentration camp horror". BBC News. June 23, 2015. Retrieved September 8, 2015.
- ^ Jessica Talarico & Gemma Lawrence. "Artists' Response To The Holocaust". Imperial War Museum. Retrieved September 16, 2016.
- ISBN 9781847172273.
- ^ Marshall, Tom (October 28, 2015). "A Chaplain at Belsen". PhotograFix. Retrieved April 26, 2023.
- ^ Wheaton, Oliver (April 14, 2015). "Chilling new pictures from Bergen Belsen mark 70th anniversary of Nazi death camp liberation". Metro. Retrieved April 26, 2023.
- ^ "Gonin".
- ^ Belsen Uncovered. Duckworth. 1946.
- ^ Goldstein, Gary (November 18, 2014). "'Night Will Fall' an eye-opener about documenting Nazi camps". [Los Angeles Times]. Retrieved April 21, 2018.
- ^ Winter, Michael (March 31, 2015). "New research sets Anne Frank's death earlier". USA Today. Retrieved April 21, 2018.
External links
- Bergen-Belsen Memorial
- NEW Online archive relating and dedicated to the men and women service personnel and the part they played at the Liberation and subsequent Humanitarian Effort of the Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp
- The United States' Holocaust Memorial website on Belsen
- Bergen-Belsen on YouTube
- Bergen-Belsen Death Camp from Holocaust Survivors and Remembrance Project: "Forget You Not"
- Film footage of Belsen concentration camp and its destruction
- Harold Le Druillenec, from the Channel Islands, was the only British survivor of Bergen Belsen. This link is to his testimony at the Bergen-Belsen trial of his experience there.
- BBC Journalist Richard Dimbleby's original radio report from April 15
- Frontline "Memory of the Camps" (includes footage of liberation of Belsen)
- The Belsen Trial of Joseph Kramer and 44 Others (full trial report)
- "A Personal Account" by Leonard Berney, Lt-Col R.A. T.D. (Rtd)
- Leonard Berney's Story - the liberation of Bergen-Belsen on Twitter
- Map of the camp, Georgia Institute of Technology
- Pictures of the liberation at Time-Life
- Jewish Calendar and Prayers from Bergen-Belsen
- Bergen Belsen and Beyond Holocaust Diary
- Holocaust Memoirs of a Bergen-Belsen survivor and Classmate of Anne Frank
- 32 photographs taken after the liberation of Belsen concentration camp. 1945