| Original caption: “A view of the interior of one of the huts.” Women and children crowded in Sinti and Romani Barracks. Consisted of Blocks 196 – 205 at Bergen Belsen. Probably built circa 1940 when the North Eastern part of the Baulager (“Construction Camp”) was rebuilt to become a barracks for the Wehrmacht guards of Stalag XI C/311. In every country brought under Nazi control during the 2nd World War, Sinti and Romani people, like Jews, were persecuted on racial grounds. Under Adolf Hitler, a supplementary decree to the Nuremberg Laws was issued on November 26, 1935, classifying the Romani people (or Roma) as “enemies of the race-based state”, thereby placing them in the same category as the Jews. Thus, the fate of the Roma in Europe paralleled that of the Jews in the Holocaust. Roma from Germany, Austria, the Czech lands, Croatia, the Netherlands, the Baltic states and parts of the occupied Soviet Union suffered the heaviest losses. In some places, such as the Nazi Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, almost the entire pre-war Romani population was wiped out. Although elsewhere – in France, Italy or Romania – the proportion of deaths was lower, Roma in these countries were deported, interned in Konzentrationslager (KZ; “Concentration Camps”) and suffered severe restrictions of their civil rights. Romani prisoners in German concentration camps such as Bergen Belsen were forced to wear the brown inverted triangle on their prison uniforms so they could be distinguished from other inmates. Roma survivors were frequently left crippled by forced labor and violent treatment in the camps, or suffered the lingering after-effects of sickness and malnutrition. Some had been subjected to sterilization or medical experiments. Roma who escaped death from mass shootings, gassing, disease or starvation often returned to find their property destroyed or stolen, their families and communities scattered. The psychological legacies of genocide affected those who had experienced Nazi rule directly, as well as their children and grandchildren. The death toll is estimated to be at about 1.5 1,000,000 out of approximately 2,000,000 European Roma. British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945. Thousands of bodies lay unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving and mortally ill people were packed together without food, water or basic sanitation. Many were suffering from typhus, dysentery and starvation. Bergen-Belsen was 1st established in 1940 as a prisoner of war camp. From 1943, Jewish civilians with foreign passports were held as ‘leverage’ in possible exchanges for Germans interned in Allied countries or for money. It later became a concentration camp and was used as a collection centre for survivors of the death marches. The camp became exceptionally overcrowded and, as a result of the Germans’ neglect, conditions were allowed to deteriorate further in the last months of the war, causing many more deaths. The British Army immediately began to organise the relief effort. Their 1st priorities were to bury the dead, contain the spread of disease, restore the water supply and arrange the distribution of food that was suitable for starving prisoners in various stages of malnutrition. Additional military and civilian medical personnel were brought in to support the relief effort. The British faced serious challenges in stabilising conditions in the camp and implementing a medical response to the crisis. Nearly 14,000 prisoners would die after liberation. Sergeant Mike Lewis (1918 – 1986) of the Number 5 Royal Army Film and Photographic Unit (AFPU) later recalled, “Something had changed for me after I’d seen that camp. Although I’d seen the terrible things in war, to have treated ordinary people like this. And there were so many theories and reasons as to who was responsible and everybody seemed to point a finger around until the finger came round in a circle and I had to think hard about it. Why the Germans? They had their own culture, their own civilization of a kind. They produced Beethoven, great scientists, how could it be? The terrible discovery came to me, this sort of revelation like a flash of lightning, because it penetrated these terrible scenes to make me think – all the stories I’d heard about the persecution of people from my mother and father, here they were true. But this was on a scale of – it had to be organized, it had to be done it could only be done with modern administrative service. It could only be done by moving masses of people by rail. It had to be planned and worked for. It was a sort of death by administration.” | |
| Image Filename | wwii0565.jpg |
| Image Size | 1.94 MB |
| Image Dimensions | 3683 x 3287 |
| Photographer | Reginald Morris |
| Photographer Title | Number Five United Kingdom Royal Army Film and Photo Section, Army Film and Photographic Unit |
| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | April 17, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen |
| City | Bergen |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | Imperial War Museum |
| Record Number | BU 3805 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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