Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen: history, photo

One of the nightmares engendered by the Second World War was the German concentration camp Bergen-Belsen, located in what is now Lower Saxony, between the village of Belsen and the small town of Bergen, which gave it its name. Despite the fact that the camp was not equipped with gas chambers, it became the site of the death of tens of thousands of prisoners.

The first prisoners of the death camp

The story of what Bergen-Belsen was - a concentration camp that received such a notorious reputation - should start with statistics. From the documents of those years it is evident that over the period from 1943 to 1945, more than fifty thousand people died of hunger and disease in it. In total for the entire period of the war the number of his victims exceeds seventy thousand.

The date of its creation is 1940. The Bergen-Belsen camp, the photo of which is presented in this article, was built to contain French and Belgian prisoners of war, who in the number of six hundred people became his first prisoners. However, with the outbreak of hostilities in the USSR, their ranks were replenished by twenty thousand Soviet soldiers and officers who were caught in hostile captivity. During the year, eighteen thousand of them died of hunger and disease.

The exchange fund of the Nazis

In 1943, the official status of the camp changed. It no longer received prisoners of war, and their place was taken by prisoners who had foreign citizenship, which could, if necessary, be exchanged for German citizens held in similar camps of the countries of the Anti-Hitler Coalition. The first echelon with prisoners who fell under this category came from Buchenwald in April 1943. Soon the number of arrivals was replenished by prisoners from the camp Nazwyler-Struthof, and after a while - from the territory of France.

Internal organization of the camp

The camp Bergen-Belsen, since 1943, had a rather complex structure. It included several units that differed both in the contingent of prisoners and in their content. The most favorable were the conditions in the so-called neutral camp (Neutralenlager).

Here prisoners were brought from countries that adhered to neutrality. They were mostly citizens of Portugal, Argentina, Spain and Turkey. The maintenance regime here was much softer than in other departments. Prisoners were not forced to work and relatively tolerably fed.

In another section, called the "Special Camp" (Sonderlager), there were Jews from Warsaw, Lviv and Krakow. The Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp became the place of their confinement, because these people had temporary passports of South American countries, such as Paraguay and Honduras, and were also suitable for exchange. They were not forced to work, but kept in strict isolation, since before their arrival in the camp many of them had witnessed the excesses committed by the SS units in Poland.

The contents of the camp of Dutch and Hungarian Jews

In Bergen-Belsen - a concentration camp of a special type - in 1944 Jews were brought from Holland, who had been in other camps up to that time. The sector in which they were kept was called the "Sternlager". He got this name because the prisoners who were in it were given the right to wear not camp striped clothes, but his usual, but beforehand having sewn onto her the six-pointed star of David. The fate of Jews deported from Holland during the Second World War was no less tragic than their counterparts from other countries. Of the eleven thousand people, only six thousand survived until the end of the war.

In July 1944, the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen was joined by more than 1,500 Jews from Hungary. For their maintenance, a separate area was designated as the "Hungarian camp" (Ungarnlager). Probably, in the case of the alleged exchange, they were given special hopes, because the conditions for their maintenance were much better than in other branches. Initially, the Bergen-Belsen camp was conceived for the maintenance of only men, but in 1944 a women's department was created in it.

Transferring the camp to the British troops

The death camp of Bergen-Belsen became one of the few camps voluntarily transferred by the Germans to the Allied forces. This happened in April 1945. The reason was that when his territory was between two German and British military groups, a typhus epidemic broke out in the camp, resulting in a real threat of contamination of soldiers of both armies. In addition, Himmler, who gave the order to surrender the camp, was extremely reluctant to be liberated by Soviet troops.

By April 1945, when the front line came close to him, there were about sixty thousand prisoners in the camp. According to the Geneva Convention, the content of civilian prisoners in the war zone is prohibited, however, in this case, the typhus epidemic made it impossible for them to evacuate.

But even in such extreme conditions, at the beginning of April, seven thousand of the most promising prisoners, from the point of view of exchange, were sent by order of Himmler to neutral camps. Mostly they were Jews from Holland and Hungary, who had citizenship of other states.

Negotiations on transferring the camp to the British

Despite the fact that the order for the transfer of the Bergen-Belsen camp to the Allied forces came from the highest leadership, negotiations with the British were delayed. The British were very reluctant to take responsibility for the lives of the nine thousand patients who were in the camp in the epidemic. In addition, for themselves this represented a serious danger of infection. To make the English more tractable, the Germans offered two strategically important bridges as a "dowry" to the camp.

Agreement conditions

According to the agreement finally reached, the area surrounding Bergen-Belsen was declared a neutral zone. Before the arrival of the British military, the protection of prisoners continued to be carried out by Wehrmacht soldiers, who were guaranteed in the future a free passage to the location of their units.

According to the agreement reached, before the camp was transferred to the British, the Nazis were obliged to restore order in it, and most importantly, to bring the dead bodies to the ground. This was an extremely difficult task, since thousands of unburied bodies lay in a lot on the territory. They were to be buried in deep trenches dug near the camp fence.

Scenes of the Apocalypse

From the memories of a participant in these events, German soldier Rudolf Küstermeier knows that for four days prisoners - two thousand prisoners, who could still keep on their feet - were dragged by corpses that were in different stages of decay. The air was filled with a terrible stench.

Work continued from early morning until late at night. In the absence of the necessary number of stretchers, bands of tarpaulins, belts or simply ropes tied to the hands and feet of corpses were used. It's hard to believe, but this infernal spectacle was accompanied by the sounds of two continuously playing orchestras, composed also of prisoners. And yet, when the deadline for the transfer of the camp came, and the British military entered it, there were more than ten thousand unburied corpses lying in the open air on the territory.

Information that has become public

British officer Derrick Sington, who carried out the camp on April 15, 1945, later wrote a book about this. In it, he says that immediately after the entry into the English camp, sick prisoners were immediately transferred to a specially trained field hospital, but despite all the efforts of the doctors, thirteen thousand people died.

This was the first of the death camps, information about which became the property of the American and British public. The reason is that he came under the control of the British, and journalists immediately appeared on his territory, who publicized everything they saw when they visited the Bergen-Belsen camp. Photos made by them could be seen on the pages of many newspapers and magazines.

Retribution

At the end of the war, the camp staff consisted of eighty people and was headed by the commandant Josef Kramer. All of them were immediately arrested and in the future, with the exception of twenty, who died as a result of typhus infection, appeared before the British military tribunal sitting in the German city of Luneburg. It was a trial of war criminals.

Despite the fact that the defendants held various positions in the camp staff, they were all charged with murder and deliberately inhuman treatment of prisoners, which contained the offense set forth in the articles of the relevant international conventions.

They were charged with a number of violent unlawful actions, which resulted from their power position in the camp structure. According to the verdict, eight defendants, including the camp commandant, were sentenced to death by hanging, and the rest to various terms of imprisonment. Materials related to the crimes of the Nazis in this camp also figured in the famous Nuremberg trial.