Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

From April 1943 to April 1945, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was a Nazi concentration camp operating under the SS code name “Aufenthaltslager” (transit camp) in the Belsen district of the municipality of Bergen in the county of Celle, in what was then the province of Hanover—now the state of Lower Saxony. Parts of the camp had previously served, and continued to serve concurrently, as a prisoner-of-war camp (Stalag XIc) for the German Wehrmacht. The camp was liberated by British and Canadian troops on April 15, 1945.

Beginning in March 1944, prisoners who had been classified as “unfit for work” in other camps were admitted; the “exchange Jews” were relocated to other barracks. The constantly expanding section of the former “prisoner camp” was now designated a “recovery camp” (the euphemistic term for a death camp in SS jargon). In reality, there was insufficient medical care and inadequate food to restore the health of the sick prisoners who had been admitted. Instead, numerous prisoners were murdered by injections of lethal substances (“Abspritzen”) or fell victim to the tolerated terror perpetrated by criminal prisoner functionaries.

Starting in August 1944, the camp was assigned a third function as a “reception camp” or “transit camp.” In this central location, armaments companies were to select suitable female forced laborers. Several thousand “Aryan” Polish women, some with children, were housed in tents on an open field. Shortly thereafter, one thousand women arrived from Auschwitz. In the fall, the tents were destroyed in a storm; until additional barracks could be erected, the prisoners had to crowd together in the existing quarters and storage sheds. By the time of liberation, 12,500 women had been imprisoned in this transit camp, of whom about 10,000 were transported to satellite camps for forced labor. Anne Frank, Hannah Pick-Goslar, and the Auschwitz Girls’ Orchestra were also sent to this section of the camp.

When evacuation transports from concentration camps near the front began arriving in December 1944, the Bergen-Belsen camp was expanded to include the section of the prisoner-of-war hospital that had previously been administered by the Wehrmacht, and in January 1945 it was used as the “Large Women’s Camp.”

Between December 1944 and March 1945, 6,000 to 7,000 sick and exhausted male prisoners arrived from the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 5,000 to 6,000 from satellite camps of the Buchenwald concentration camp, as well as others from the Dora-Mittelbau concentration camp and the satellite camps of the Natzweiler and Flossenbürg concentration camps. Some barracks in “Prisoner Camp II” were occupied by as many as 1,500 people; there were neither running drinking water nor washing facilities.

In December 1944, the camp—now headed by SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer—had 15,257 inmates and was officially designated by the WVHA as the “Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.” Further “evacuation trains” from camps near the front arrived in rapid succession. Accommodations, sanitary facilities, and food were by no means sufficient. Epidemics broke out; eventually, there was no food left.

The evolution of the prisoner population can be reconstructed only in broad strokes. On January 1, 1945, there were 18,465 prisoners in the camp; on January 15, 22,286; on March 1, 41,520; and on March 15, 45,117. In March 1945 alone, 18,168 deaths were recorded at Bergen-Belsen. By mid-April, approximately 35,000 people had perished. The mass deaths continued even after the liberation.