Qualla: Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: Introduction

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Globe-trotter, CC BY-SA 3.0. The markers in the heath are almost identical. Each is a low stone at the head of a long grassy rectangle, and each carries a single line: Here lie 5,000 dead. April 1945. There are several, spread through birch scrub and heather southwest of the town of Bergen in Lower Saxony. Nothing here looks like a camp. The British burned the huts to stop the typhus, and grass took the ground back. The mounds are what is left.

Image: Globe-trotter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: A Camp for Bargaining

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bolli, Public domain. Belsen did not begin as a place for killing. Belgian and French prisoners of war were housed here in June 1940, and from June 1941 the site was expanded into Stalag XI-C (311), built for up to 20,000 Soviet prisoners. By the end of March 1942, some 41,000 Soviet prisoners had die...

Image: Bolli | Public domain

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: The Winter the Camp Filled

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arne List, CC BY-SA 3.0. In July 1944 Belsen held 7,300 people. By December there were 15,000; by February 1945, 22,000; by 15 April, around 60,000. Camps in the east were being emptied ahead of the Red Army. Josef Kramer arrived from Auschwitz-Birkenau in December 1944 as commandant. A women's camp had ...

Image: Arne List | CC BY-SA 3.0

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: The Fifteenth of April

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oakes, H (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit, Public domain. As British and Canadian forces advanced in April 1945, the German army negotiated a truce and an exclusion zone around the camp to keep the typhus inside it. Himmler agreed on 11 April to hand Belsen over without a fight, and an agreement signed early on 13 April created a neutra...

Image: Oakes, H (Sgt), No 5 Army Film & Photographic Unit | Public domain

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: What Medicine Could Not Undo

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Benutzer:AxelHH, Public domain. Liberation did not stop the dying. Another 14,000 people died between 15 April and the end of June. Months of starvation had wrecked digestive systems past the point where ordinary food helped, and army bully beef killed people who ate it. The Medical Research Council sent a team...

Image: Benutzer:AxelHH | Public domain

Bergen-Belsen concentration camp: The Ground Itself

Mon, 03 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Aconcagua, CC BY-SA 3.0. A British military tribunal at Lüneburg tried forty-five people between September and November 1945: Kramer, sixteen other SS men, sixteen female SS guards and twelve former kapos, several also charged with crimes at Auschwitz. No German soldier was ever tried for what was done t...

Image: Aconcagua | CC BY-SA 3.0