One of the nightmares caused by World War II 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 was so infamous - should start with statistics. From the documents of those years, it is clear that more than fifty thousand people died of starvation and disease in it only from 1943 to 1945. In total, over the entire period of the war, the number of its 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, which in number of six hundred people became his first prisoners. However, with the outbreak of hostilities on the territory of the USSR, their ranks were replenished by twenty thousand Soviet soldiers and officers who were captured by the enemy. During the year, eighteen thousand of them died of starvation and disease.
Nazi Exchange Fund
In 1943, the official status of the camp changed. Prisoners of war no longer entered it, and their place was taken by prisoners who had foreign citizenship, which could, on occasion, be exchanged for German citizens held in similar camps in the countries of the Anti-Hitler coalition. The first train with prisoners falling into this category arrived from Buchenwald in April 1943. Soon, the number of arrivals was replenished by prisoners from the Nazweiler-Strutthof camp, and after some time from the territory of France.
Internal organization of the camp
The Bergen-Belsen camp, starting in 1943, had a rather complex structure. It included several units that differed both in the contingent of prisoners and their content. The most favorable conditions were in the so-called neutral camp (Neutralenlager).
Prisoners from neutral countries were brought here. These were mainly citizens of Portugal, Argentina, Spain and Turkey. The regime of detention here was much milder than in other departments. The prisoners were not forced to work and were relatively well fed.
In another branch, called the “Special Camp” (Sonderlager), were Jews from Warsaw, Lviv and Krakow. The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp became their place of detention because these people had temporary passports from South American countries such as Paraguay and Honduras, and were also suitable for exchange. They were not forced to work, but were kept in strict isolation, since before they arrived at the camp, many of them witnessed the atrocities committed by SS units in Poland.
Detention in the camp of Dutch and Hungarian Jews
In Bergen-Belsen, a concentration camp of a special type, Jews from Holland, who were then in other camps, were brought back in 1944. The sector in which they were kept was called the “Sternlager”. He got this name in view of the fact that the prisoners who were in him were given the right to wear not striped striped clothes, but their usual clothes, but previously having sewed the six-pointed star of David on it. The fate of the 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 to the end of the war.
In July 1944, more than one and a half thousand Jews from Hungary joined the Nazi concentration camp Bergen-Belsen. For their maintenance, a separate area was identified, called the "Hungarian camp" (Ungarnlager). Probably, in the case of the alleged exchange, they had particular hopes, because the conditions of their detention were much better than in other departments. Initially, the Bergen-Belsen camp was conceived to contain only men, but in 1944 a women's department was also created in it.
Transfer of the camp to the British troops
The Bergen-Belsen death camp has become one of the few camps voluntarily surrendered by the Germans to the Allied forces. This happened in April 1945. The reason was that when its territory was between two groups of troops - German and British - an epidemic of typhus broke out in the camp, which created a real threat of infection of soldiers of both armies. In addition, Himmler, who gave the order to surrender the camp, did not want 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 detention of civilian prisoners in the war zone is prohibited, however, in this case, the typhoid epidemic made it impossible to evacuate them.
But even in such extreme conditions, in early April, seven thousand of the most promising prisoners from the exchange point of view were sent to neutral camps on the orders of Himmler. These were mainly 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 to transfer the Bergen-Belsen camp to the Allied forces came from the highest leadership, negotiations with the British dragged on. The British really did not want to take responsibility for the lives of nine thousand patients who were in a camp under the epidemic. In addition, for themselves this posed a serious risk of infection. To make the British more accommodating, the Germans proposed to give them two strategically important bridges as a "dowry" to the camp.
Terms of an agreement
According to the agreement reached, the territory surrounding Bergen – Belsen was declared a neutral zone. Prior to the arrival of the British military, the protection of prisoners continued to be carried out by Wehrmacht soldiers, who were subsequently guaranteed free passage to the place of deployment of their units.
According to the agreement, before transferring the camp to the British, the Nazis were obliged to restore order in it, and most importantly, to bring to the ground the corpses of the dead. This was an extremely difficult task, since thousands of unburied bodies lay in large numbers on the territory. They were to be buried in deep trenches dug not far from the camp fence.
Scenes of the Apocalypse
From the recollections of the participant of these events, a German soldier Rudolph Küstermeyer, it is known that for four days prisoners - two thousand prisoners, of those who could still stand on their feet - dragged corpses that were in different stages of decomposition. The air was filled with a terrible stench.
Work continued from early morning until late at night. In the absence of the required number of stretchers, tarpaulin strips, belts or just ropes tied to the arms and legs of corpses were used. It is hard to believe, but this hellish sight 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 had already entered it, more than ten thousand unburied corpses lying in the open remained on the territory.
Public Information
The British officer Derrick Sington, who hosted the camp on April 15, 1945, subsequently wrote a book about it. In it, he says that immediately after entering the British camp, sick prisoners were immediately transferred to a specially prepared field hospital, but despite all the efforts of physicians, thirteen thousand people died.
This was the first of the death camps, the information of which became known to the American and British public. The reason is that he fell under the control of the British, and journalists immediately appeared on his territory, publicizing 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 led by commandant Joseph Kramer. All of them were immediately arrested and later, with the exception of twenty who died as a result of contracting typhus, they appeared before the British military tribunal, which met 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 intentionally inhuman treatment of prisoners, which entailed the corpus delicti provided for in the articles of the relevant international conventions.
He was charged with a number of brutal unlawful acts resulting from their power position in the camp structure. According to the verdict, eight defendants, including the commandant of the camp, 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 appeared on the famous Nuremberg trials.