| Original caption: “View of the English version of the sign posted by the British army at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.” The sign was created by Bombardier Arthur Reginald Price (July 15, 1915 – July 1990), a signwriter who was serving with the 113th Durham Light Infantry, 113th Light Anti Aircraft Regiment, 369th Battery. His regiment arrived at Bergen Belsen on April 17, 2 days after its liberation. There, Price was tasked with producing signs for a film crew to help document the scenes, as they had no sound recording available, as well as to mark the graves and to ensure that troops were aware of the Typhus outbreak. His signature, “Price,” may be seen in the upper right corner. Price is photographed viewing his work. 369th Battery was assigned to Camp Number 1, where his Troop was assigned to bury the dead. He witnessed the Schutzstaffel SS guards spitting on their British soldiers supervising them while they buried corpses; they didn’t respect the dead and were quickly sent to Celle for their safety and the safety of their British supervisors. Price’s Troop was detailed to bury 8,000 bodies by April 26. There were too few British soldiers anyway to protect the SS guards; Price often felt he was the only British soldier in the camp. CXhildren would follow him wherever he went. Guns were plentiful and prisoners and Hungarian soldiers often shot at random. When ordered to create the sign for film cameras, Price enlisted Bombardier Cyril Nicklin (1916 – 1994) because he wasn’t coping well with burial detail. They were pressured to complete painting the sign so that the press could head to Berlin. Nicklin was ordered to return to burial detail and wasn’t able to help with the German language version of the sign. The 1st commemorative signs at the site of the former camp were put there by survivors themselves, who placed personal plaques and memorial stones near the mass graves. These were supplemented by large panels with explanatory text in German and English which the British Army installed at the former entrance to the camp shortly after the liberation. In September 1945, Jewish Displaced Persons (DPs) erected a provisional wooden monument in the grounds of the former camp during the 1st Congress of Liberated Jews in the British Zone. For most of the Jewish survivors, Bergen-Belsen was not only a place in which to mourn the dead, it was symbolically associated with their political goals at the time: emigration to Palestine and the foundation of the State of Israel. Representatives of the Jewish Central Committee also voiced these demands at the dedication of the stone monument on the 1st anniversary of the liberation in April 1946. Not long after the liberation, a Polish camp committee was established in the DP camp with the aim of keeping alive the memory of the Poles who had been murdered. On November 2, 1945, a large wooden cross was dedicated in the former camp in the presence of several 1,000 survivors as well as representatives of the Vatican and the British military government. By the end of 1945, the Soviet military mission had erected a monument at the entrance to the Bergen-Belsen prisoner of war cemetery dedicated to the nearly 20,000 Soviet victims of the Bergen-Belsen POW camp. A stone monument with name plaques was placed in a separate section of the cemetery for Italian military internees in 1950. This monument was taken down in 1958 when the bodies of the Italian military internees were reinterred in the Hamburg-Öjendorf cemetery. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0574.jpg |
| Image Size | 418.28 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1788 x 1694 |
| Photographer | Charles H. Hewitt |
| 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 | May 29, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen |
| City | Bergen |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | Imperial War Museum |
| Record Number | BU 6955 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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