photo #9144387

This day (April 15) in 1945, British troops liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Bergen-Belsen was not meant to be an extermination camp like Auschwitz. It was a POW camp in 1940, became a concentration camp for Jews in 1943 & in the winter of 1944, everything changed. As the Red Army advanced from the east, the Nazis emptied concentration camps and put the surviving inhabitants through brutal “death marches.” Several of these death marches ended at Bergen-Belsen where tens of thousands of starving, disease-ridden prisoners were simply dumped. The camp, originally built for 10,000 people, was crammed with more than 60,000 souls. There was almost no food, almost no water, and almost no medicine. A massive typhus epidemic exploded. Prisoners began dying by the thousands every week whether by starvation, exposure, or disease. Massive piles of corpses built up - the “living” were too weak to move them. Liberating British soldiers later described walking on “a carpet of bodies.” Among the dying was a 15-year-old Dutch girl whom the world would come to know through her diary - Anne Frank. Like so many others, Anne and her sister Margot died from typhus in late February or early March 1945, a few weeks before liberation. Their bodies were just two among thousands that were simply thrown into one of the mass graves. We will never know exactly where. When British troops first arrived, the SS guards were still there (many of the most notorious were women); and they did not let up in their cruelty even as the war was coming to an end. The SS guards continued to beat dying Jews with clubs and whips while they lay on the ground in agony. One British officer later said the scene was “beyond the capacity of human imagination.” After liberating the camp, the British troops forced the local German population from nearby towns to come and witness what had been done in their name; and then they were forced to help bury the dead. Here are just the cold, hard death numbers from Bergen-Belson: At liberation, there were around 60,000 prisoners barely alive; In the first five weeks after liberation, another 13,000 prisoners died anyway, as they were too far gone from typhus, starvation, and disease; and The total number of deaths at Bergen-Belsen during the war was between 50,000–70,000. This is what the Allies found when they finally reached the heart of the Nazi Reich. They had known for years that atrocities were occurring. They had the photos. They had the intelligence reports. And yet the horror of seeing it all first-hand exceeded anything they could possibly have imagined. One more word on Bergen-Belson: some of the surviving Jews would not leave that camp for several more years, as the British turned it into the largest Displaced Persons (DP) camp in their occupation zone. Jews with nowhere to go. Tens of thousands of emaciated Jews remained behind the same barbed wire, still wearing their striped uniforms or rags, and living in the same overcrowded barracks where thousands of their brethren had just died of typhus and starvation. The British were 100% responsible for keeping them there, as they were still enforcing the illegal 1939 White Paper that kept the doors of Mandate Palestine closed to Jewish immigration - the one place in the world where Jews were wanted. But rather than reverse the White Paper, the British preferred to keep surviving Jews in the very camps where they were tortured and their loved ones were murdered. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish DPs across Europe were trapped in these camps. They were begging to go to the Land of Israel. It would take a revolt in Mandate Palestine to cause the British to finally leave, and a War of Independence against five invading Arab armies before the DPs could finally leave their torment and build new lives in their ancient homeland - Israel. The one place on Earth they could call home.