Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
Bergen-Belsen (or Belsen) was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943 parts of it became a concentration camp. Originally this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. Eventually, the camp was expanded to accommodate Jews from other concentration camps.
Later still the name was applied to the displaced persons camp established nearby, but it is most commonly associated with the concentration camp. From 1941 to 1945 almost 20,000 Russian prisoners of war and a further 50,000 inmates died there, with up to 35,000 of them dying of typhus in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation.
The camp was liberated on April 15, 1945 by the British 11th Armoured Division. They discovered around 53,000 prisoners inside, most of them half-starved and seriously ill, and another 13,000 corpses lying around the camp unburied. The horrors of the camp, documented on film and in pictures, made the name "Belsen" emblematic of Nazi crimes in general for public opinion in Western countries in the immediate post-1945 period.
Read more about Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp: Liberation, Aftermath, Personal Accounts, Media
Famous quotes containing the words concentration camp and/or camp:
“Despite the hundreds of attempts, police terror and the concentration camps have proved to be more or less impossible subjects for the artist; since what happened to them was beyond the imagination, it was therefore also beyond art and all those human values on which art is traditionally based.”
—A. Alvarez (b. 1929)
“Usually the scenery about them is drear and savage enough; and the logger’s camp is as completely in the woods as a fungus at the foot of a pine in a swamp; no outlook but to the sky overhead; no more clearing than is made by cutting down the trees of which it is built, and those which are necessary for fuel.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)