A Chronology of Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

The complex that would eventually become the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was initially constructed to house workers building nearby military bases in “Fallingbostel and the village of Belsen.” Up to three-thousand workers at a time were housed in these crude huts— a small percentage of the 22,000 that would be interred by 1945. The huts were left abandoned by 1939; they were repurposed by the Wermacht to house 600 French and Belgian POWs in the summer of 1940 after the invasion of the Low Countries/Fall Gelb (Case Yellow) had concluded. The complex’s location in central Germany made it a convenient location to house prisoners from both fronts— by July of 1941, 2,000 Soviet POWs had arrived. There would be more than 20,000 Soviet prisoners interred at Belsen by year’s end. In August of that same year, the first trace of antisemitic activity begins; a Gestapo Einsatzkommando selects 500 Jews and political opponents to be transferred to Sachsenhausen and executed. (Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten)

Belsen existed strictly as a POW camp until April of 1943, when the SS requisition the southern section of the camp in order to create an “exchange camp,” which housed Jewish hostages the SS would later exchange for imprisoned German expats. In September of 1943 the sternlager (Star Camp) is created by the SS— the first group of Jewish prisoners arrives from the Netherlands shortly thereafter. Belsen remains a hybrid exchange camp/POW camp until March of 1944, when the SS designates Belsen as an erholungslager (Recuperation Camp). Belsen was now tasked with housing Jewish prisoners from other concentration camps that were too sick to continue work. The number of prisoners housed would drastically increase during this time period, from 7,300 in July of 1944, to 15,000 in December of that same year. (United States Holocaust Memorial Museum) The camp now becomes more segregated by nationality and gender— the ungarnlager (Hungarian Camp) is established in the summer of 1944 specifically to house Hungarian Jews. In addition, a women’s camp specifically to house female soldiers of the Polish Home Army that were captured during the Warsaw Uprising.

In December of 1944, the SS-Wirtschafts-und Verwaltungshauptamt (WVHA) officially designates Bergen-Belsen a concentration camp, and the former camp commanding officer, Adolf Haas, was replaced by Josef Kramer. Within the next month, Bergen-Belsen would receive over 85,000 Jewish prisoners from camps evacuated ahead of the Eastern Front, and the majority of the remaining POWs were transferred away. By January of 1945, Bergen-Belsen was entirely devoted to housing Jewish prisoners. By April of 1945, the population of the camp would climb to over 60,000. (Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten)

These three distinct periods serve as a way of tracking the evolution of Belsen as a camp— initially used to house POWs, then as a combined POW/Jewish exchange camp, and lastly as a concentration camp tasked solely with holding Jewish prisoners. Although the transitions between each phase was clearly noted by SS high command, the complicated history of Bergen-Belsen would play a pivotal role in the post-war Belsen Trials as camp officials used the camp’s ever-changing function as a way of deflecting responsibility for the atrocities committed therein.