Bergen-Belsen Memorial

Bergen-Belsen had no gas chamber. It killed by hunger, thirst, typhus and neglect, and in its last months it received transports of prisoners evacuated on foot from camps in the east, arriving into a place with no food, no water supply and no shelter for them. Around fifty thousand prisoners died there, together with about twenty thousand Soviet prisoners of war held in the adjacent camp. Anne Frank and her sister Margot died of typhus here a few weeks before liberation; the exact date and place of their burial are unknown.

British troops entered the camp on 15 April 1945 under a local truce and found some sixty thousand survivors too weak to stand and thirteen thousand bodies lying unburied. The BBC correspondent's broadcast and the army film footage were among the first accounts of a camp that reached the British public directly. Nearly fourteen thousand people died after liberation despite treatment. The huts were burned to prevent the spread of typhus, so almost nothing of the camp remains: the site today is grass, with long low mounds bearing stones that record how many thousand lie under each.