| Original caption: “Women and children crowded together in one of the camp huts. There is no furniture. Any spare clothing is hung on the walls.” Bergen Belsen, near Hanover in northwest Germany, was already a Prisoner of War camp that established a special camp for prominent Jews of belligerent and neutral states, who might be exchanged for German citizens interned abroad in March 1943. Conditions in the camp at the time were good by concentration camp standards, and most prisoners were not subjected to forced labor. However, beginning in the spring of 1944 the situation deteriorated rapidly. In March Belsen was redesignated an Ehrholungslager (“Recuperation Camp”), where prisoners of other camps who were too sick to work were brought, though none actually received medical treatment. As the Heer (“Regular Nazi German Army”) retreated in the face of the advancing Allies, the concentration camps were evacuated, and their prisoners sent to Bergen Belsen. The facilities in the camp were unable to accommodate the sudden influx of thousands of prisoners and all basic services – food, water and sanitation – collapsed, leading to the outbreak of disease. By April 1945 over 60,000 prisoners were incarcerated in Belsen in 2 camps located a mile and half (2.4 kilometers) apart. Camp Number 2 was opened only a few weeks before the liberation, on the site of a military hospital and barracks. Members of the United Kingdom Royal Army Artillery 63rd Anti-Tank Regiment liberated Belsen on April 15. They arrested its commandant, Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer (November 10, 1906 – December 13, 1945). The relief operation that followed was directed by Brigadier Hugh Llewellyn Glyn Hughes July 1892 – November 24, 1973), Deputy Director of the Royal Army Medical Corps, 2nd Army. Between April 18 and April 28, efforts were made to bury the dead. At 1st, the Schutzstaffel (SS) guards were made to collect and bury the bodies in a humiliating public effort. They labored manually without personal protective equipment, which killed 20 of the 80 Nazi Germans working in the pits. But they could not keep up with the thousands of bodies all over the camp. The former inmates vicariously watched as the guards that tortured them were forced to bury the dead. Eventually the British had to resort to bulldozers to push the thousands of bodies into mass graves. Evacuation of the camp began on April 21. Former inmates washed and deloused at the rate of 1,000 per day. Inmates visited “Harrod’s” a camp warehouse, where they could pick out shoes and clothes. After being deloused inmates were transferred to Camp Number 2, which had been converted into a temporary hospital and rehabilitation camp. As each of the barracks was cleared they were burned down to combat the spread of typhus. On May 19, evacuation was completed and 2 days later the ceremonial burning of the last barracks brought to an end the 1st stage of the relief operations. Surviving displaced persons (DPs), mostly Jews, were transferred to Camp 3 on May 21, 1945, from camps 3. By mid to late May, Bergen Belsen assumed the status of a Displaced Person’s camp. In July, 6,000 former inmates were taken by the Red Cross to Sweden for convalescence, while the rest remained in the newly-established DP camp to await repatriation or emigration. Women’s barracks at Bergen Belsen were in 2 areas of the camp in 1944-1945. The Großes Frauenlager (“Large Women’s Camp”) of barracks 1-3 and 196-224; and the Kleines Frauenlager (“Small Women’s Camp”) of barracks 42-50. After the Ehrholungslager section of Bergen Belsen became overcrowded, the SS moved sick female prisoners into a so-called Zeltlager (“tent camp”). The Zeltlager was erected in August 1944 in a portion of the “prisoners’ camp” section, and initially served as a transit camp for non-Jewish women from Poland, whom the Germans had deported to the Reich to work in armaments factories. By the beginning of November 1944, the tent camp held around 8,000 women, whom the SS had evacuated from Auschwitz-Birkenau; most of them were Jewish. That month, after a storm destroyed the Zeltlager, camp officials established the so-called small Kleines Frauenlager and transferred the surviving prisoners of the tent camp to the small women’s camp. Conditions in this camp deteriorated further as new prisoners arrived. Among these women were Anne Frank (June 12, 1929 – c. February or March 1945) and her sister Margot (February 16, 1926 – c. February or March 1945), both of whom died in Bergen Belsen. The British soldiers who arrived in Bergen Belsen were horrified by the conditions. Most took to referring to the konzentrationslager as the “horror camp.” The death rate actually went up under British administration, until a 100 medical students were brought in from the United Kingdom to manage the situation. The prisoners were initially fed from United Kingdom Royal Army rations, which killed them instantly because their digestive systems could not handle real food. Typhus, spread by fleas and lice, was rampant, and there was little the British could do since they didn’t prevent the former inmates from moving about. The medical students stopped movement and fed the former inmates a form of watery gruel, which began to arrest the death rate. Leslie Cole (August 11, 1910 – 1976), Belsen War Artists Advisory Committee commission, was 1 of 4 artists asked to document the Women’s barracks through illustration. His ability deal unflinchingly with violence and death made him the perfect artist for this work. He later recalled, “The Camp is large – twelve square miles [thirty-one square kilometers] – and divided into compounds like chicken runs with huts bare of any furniture or conveniences. The huts normally accommodate fifty but as many as four hundred were put in. The woman’s compounds were the most tragic and horrible and the worst cases of disease were located here, both in number and intensity. During my visit the victims were still dying in the open and the woman in the centre of my picture collapsed while I was drawing. There are many bodies lying about clothed and unclothed and these were left as the British MOs [Medical Officers] had not enough personnel to check if death had set in. If the body disappeared at night it was alive.” United Kingdom Royal Army Lieutenant Colonel Mervyn W. Gonin (July 19, 1904 – July 13, 1971), General Officer Commanding 11th Light Field Ambulance, Royal Army Medical Corps, later recalled, I can give no adequate description of the “Horror Camp” in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare and devoid of vegetation as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles where they had been dumped by other inmates, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen as they shuffled along the dirt tracks. Those who died of disease usually died in the huts. When starvation was the chief cause of death they died in the open for it is an odd characteristic of starvation that its victims feel compelled to go on wandering till they fall down and die.” “Once they had fallen they seem to die almost at once and it took a little time to get used to seeing men, women and children collapse as you walked by them and restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that 500 a day were dying and 500 a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diphtheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it. One saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched half a loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference between worms and bread.” “The problems were: 1. To stop the typhus spreading. 2. To bury the dead before the hot summer started cholera. 3. To feed the sick in the “Horror Camp” who were dying of starvation more rapidly than of their illness. 4. To remove from the “Horror Camp” those who might live with some form of systematized feeding and nursing. 5. To help those who lived regain their humanity.” “What we had therefore was buildings, eight nurses, about three hundred Royal Army Medical Corps chaps, a regiment of Light Anti-Aircraft Artillery, at least 20,000 sick, suffering from the most virulent diseases known to man, all of whom required urgent hospital treatment and 30,000 men, women and children who might not die if they were not doctored but who would most certainly die if they were not fed and removed from the Horror Camp. What we had not got was nurses, doctors, beds, bedding, clothes, drugs, dressings, thermometers, bedpans or any of the essentials of medical treatment and worst of all no common language.” “While we were evacuating the horror camp, my Regimental Sergeant Major had taken on the task of feeding some of the sick. There was little he could do, but by begging, borrowing and stealing food, he and eight men with him distributed 4,000 meals twice a day – a tremendous undertaking. The need of it was self-evident. The gunners were doing wonders in running a kitchen to which those internees who could walk would come with bins and collect food, hot soup, etcetera, which they took back to the inmates of the huts where it was distributed. At least it got to those who were fit enough to come to the bins when they were brought to the huts. If they were too weak to go to the distributors or if they were of the wrong nationality, they got none. By the wrong nationality, I mean that whatever nationality was in a majority in any hut they got the food. I believe there were exceptions, the Dutch and French would keep (id est, feed) people of other races but in most cases there was a most distressing racial feeling.” United Kingdom Royal Army Major Savile Geoffrey Champion (October 17, 1901 – December 7, 1982), Legal Staff, Number 1 War Crimes Investigation Team collected eyewitness statements of the British officers who liberated Bergen Belsen. The Deposition of United Kingdom Royal Army Lieutenant Colonel James A. D. Johnston, General Officer Commanding 32 Casualty Clearing Station, Royal Army Medical Corps, read in part, “The prisoners were a dense mass of emaciated apathetic scarecrows huddled together in wooden huts, and in many cases without beds or blankets, and in some cases without any clothing whatsoever. The females were in worse condition than the men and their clothing generally, if they had any, only filthy rags. The dead lay all over the camp and in piles outside the blocks of huts which housed the worst of the sick and were miscalled hospitals. There were thousands of naked and emaciated corpses in various stages of decomposition lying unburied. Sanitation was to all practical purposes non-existent. Pits with, in only a few instances, wooden perch rails, were available in totally inadequate numbers. The inmates, from starvation, apathy and weakness, defecated and urinated where they sat or lay, even inside the living huts. Ablution arrangements were completely inadequate. There was no running water or electricity. All water was brought in by British water trucks.” David Cordley Bradford (1922 – March 17, 2002), medical student at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School who went to Bergen Belsen, recalled, “The spring of 1945 I was in my third year at Barts as a clinical student. We were asked if we would be prepared to give up a month of our training to go abroad to do some relief work. Nobody told us exactly what we were going to do, but we thought we were going to Holland to try to do something about the starving children that had been left behind by the Germans after the occupation. And, of course, being medical students, we felt perhaps that we were being rather feather-bedded. Our friends were all in the Army, the Navy and so on, and had had quite a hectic time. I’d lost several friends who had been at school with me, in the Navy and the Air Force. And this was our chance to get away and to do something, perhaps slightly different, to help the war effort.” Ian Reginald Davidson Proctor (1915 – 2005), medical student at Saint Bartholomew’s Hospital Medical School recalled, “We walked into the hut, held our noses, walked round, walked out again, looked at each other and said where do we start?” Michael Coigley (June 14, 1924 – July 22, 2014), medical student at Saint Thomas’s Hospital Medical School, wrote on May 5, 1945: “We so there every day of the week and work from 0800 Hours until 1800 Hours with one and half hours break for lunch. I feel dead at the end of it. That is not the end though – for we have a conference from 1815 Hours to 1915 Hours to check upon the chaos here. There is then a council from about 2130 Hours onwards from Group Leaders and various other officials that have been appointed. We are run by two doctors – one in United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) and the other in the Royal Army Medical Corps, a veritable firebrand who has worked miracles. The position as regards us medical students is this: Each one is in charge of a hut and it is his job to see that the inmates are properly fed. For this job we brought over big supplies of glucose vitamin mixture and pre-digested milk protein. I have a Women’s hut in which there were 160 people badly ill. Almost all have starvation diarrhea and are lying huddled almost on top of each other wallowing in filth and crying for attention.” Alan David Rowan MacAuslan (1921 – May 25, 2018), medical student at Saint Thomas’s Hospital Medical School recalled, “I went into the middle of the hut and yelled for someone who could speak English, but got no reply, so I tried in very shaky German. The result was an uproar, but a cleanish looking woman appeared, called Vircha, and said she was in charge of the place. At this point, Ian Whimster [(September 3, 1923 – January 10, 1979)] turned up with medicine, which consisted of twenty opium tablets at a third of a gram, thirty aspirins, some tannalbin [diarrhea-reducing herbal medicine], which is a German preparation that we had not heard of before, three three-inch (7.62 centimeter) bandages and a packet of gauze.” “We took a look round. There was feces all over the floor, the majority of people having diarrhea and passing a stool like a small cow pat – there were tin cans and lumps of black bread all mixed up with it, and the place could not have been swept for years. I was standing rather aghast in the middle of all this filth, trying to get used to the smell, which was a mixture of post-mortem room, a sewer, sweat, and foul pus, for none of the windows were open, when I heard a scrabbling on the floor. I looked down in the half light, and saw a woman crouching at my feet. She had black matted hair, well populated [with lice], and her ribs stood out as though there were nothing between them, her arms were so thin that they were horrible. She was defecating, but she was so weak that she could not lift her buttocks from the floor, and as she had diarrhea, the yellow liquid stools bubbled up over her thighs. Her feet were white and podgy from famine edema, and she had scabies. As she crouched, she scratched her genital parts, which were scabetic too. Later on, we tried to pass a nasal tube on her, to give her protein hydrolysate, but her nose was so atrophied and blocked, that we could not get the thin tube down, and part of the nasal conchae came adrift on the end of it.” “But the floor was a minor consideration compared to the beds and the people. Most of the bunks had inmates, some two or three, and they were all smeared with feces, because the people with diarrhea did not bother to get out of bed. The result was that urine and feces dribbled through the wooden boards of the top two bunks on to the lowest one, and as this last was the least comfortable, all the dying and weaker patients could be found there. Each patient had a collection of filthy tin cans and boxes at the head of their bed, where they stored their treasures and kept odd bits of food. The worst cases had their hands covered with dried excreta, but it did not stop them eating or scratching. Some had no clothes at all, but the majority were dressed in blue and white striped night gowns. Outside, someone had dug a six-seater latrine, but the patients hardly used it at first, partly because they were too weak to walk the thirty feet to it, and partly because they were not used to that sort of luxury.” After liberation, British occupation authorities established a displaced persons camp that housed more than 12,000 survivors. It was located in a German military school barracks near the original concentration camp site, and functioned until 1951. | |
| Image Filename | wwii0568.jpg |
| Image Size | 260.66 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 2052 x 1359 |
| Photographer | Edward George William Malindine |
| 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 23, 1945 |
| Location | Konzentrationslager Bergen-Belsen |
| City | Bergen |
| State or Province | Lower Saxony |
| Country | Germany |
| Archive | Imperial War Museum |
| Record Number | BU 3737 |
| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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