Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp

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We all know how the dictator Hitler massacred the Jews and spread terror throughout the world during World War II.  The Belsen torture center can be called as a main evidence showing that destruction.  The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp complex outside the German town of Kelley is a grim reminder of the death toll of 50,000 people.  Even after the camp was liberated by the Allied forces on April 15, 1945, 13,000 former prisoners died of various complications.

In 1935, near the village of Belsen in the city of Bergen, the largest military base in Germany at that time was built.  The workers' barracks built on the military base were abandoned after work on the camp was completed and in 1939 they were used as a prison camp for prisoners of war.  In 1943 it became a concentration camp where Jews were held.  Originally named "Civil Concentration Camp", it was later renamed "Detention Camp".

                                      Name Bord


                                                                                                                                                                                        Structure

Both the "Residential Camp" and the "Prisoner's Camp" operated from April 1943 to April 1945.  The "Residential Camp" consisted of various sub-camps, some of which were named "Special Camp", "General Camp", "Star Camp".  ", and "Hungarian camp". The camps were segregated by race or class and surrounded by barbed wire.

According to Holocaust reports, prisoners in the "Star Camp" were forced to wear yellow stars of David without prison uniforms.  Prisoners intended to be exchanged with the Western powers for German prisoners and Jews who were citizens of a neutral country were also held here.




                                                                                                                              prisoners

The population of Bergen-Belsen consisted mostly of Jews.  The remaining groups included political prisoners, prisoners of war, illiterate (Romani) and socialists.  The latter category basically included anyone deemed unfit for Nazi German society.

Both Soviet forces in the East and Allied forces in the West saw a sharp increase in the number of Bergen-Belsen prisoners.  With the evacuation of camps near both fronts in late 1944 and early 1945, the Nazis had only a few places left to hold men they did not kill, and they often sent them to Bergen-Belsen.  For example, the Frank sisters were moved from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in 1944, where Anne Frank died.  Bergen-Belsen was designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, but by 1945 it had grown to six times that number.




By the end of the war, many of the new inmates were women, and the northern section, which had been used as a prison camp, had to be demolished and the "Great Women's Camp" established.  Thousands of women from concentration camps evacuated from Europe in January 1945 gathered here for this cruel reorganization.  In 1944, the number of women in the camp increased from 8,700 to 30,000.  Thousands of female prisoners from Flossenberg, Grosse-Rosen, Ravensbach, Nieuwengem, Mauthausen and Buchenwald concentration camps and various labor camps were deported to Belsen.  By February 1945, 22,000 starving prisoners were living in barracks and plague-ridden sub-camps, and by April they held more than 60,000 prisoners.  By early 1945, prisoners were said to be starving for days, served only potato soup cooked in poor conditions, often using perishable ingredients.

In terms of sanitary conditions, Bergen-Belsen's toilets were minimal and the water supply was inadequate for its conditions.  This lack of food and water, poor sanitation and overcrowded barracks led to uncontrollable epidemics.  Dysentery, typhoid fever, typhus and tuberculosis spread throughout the barracks at Bergen-Belsen.  As a result, the death rate rose rapidly.  Tens of thousands, including Anne Frank, tragically died in 1945, months before the Allies arrived to rescue her.

British troops entered Bergen-Belsen concentration camp on April 15, 1945.  But after the liberation of the camp, more than 13,000 seriously ill prisoners died.  In the two years from May 1943 to April 15, 1945, between 36,400 and 37,600 prisoners and about 50,000 died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.

   After the British finished evacuating the prisoners from the camp, they burned the ground to stop the spread of typhus.



Unfortunately, the Nazis managed to destroy documents and information about SS authorities and camp personnel.

The number and positions of SS officers changed throughout their time at Bergen-Belsen, and although much information was deliberately destroyed, 48 of them were put on trial in the 1945 trial.  Of these, 19 were found guilty and sentenced to various terms of imprisonment.  The court acquitted 14 people.  However, Kremer and 10 others were executed on December 12, 1945.




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