Bergen-Belsen Liberation and Living Conditions

On April 15, 1945 Bergen-Belsen was officially turned over by SS command to British forces. By this date, approximately 37,600 prisoners had already died. 13,000 would be too weak to recover and would not live to see the end of the British liberation effort. (Herzberg) According to some accounts, the average life of a man in any given Block was 12 days after arrival. (Le Druillenec) The camp had not been able to keep up with the swell of transferred prisoners as camps nearer to the front were evacuated. By the time the camp was liberated, “The camp was completely infested.” Renee Salt recalls, “No food was coming into the camp and the water supply had been cut off. Like leaves that fall from a tree, people were falling down and dying. There was sheer chaos in the camp.” (Salt) Brigadier Glyn-Hughes, a member of the liberation force, describes the horrid conditions at Bergen-Belsen:

“The conditions in the camp were really indescribable; no description nor photograph could really bring home the horrors that were there outside the huts, and the frightful scenes inside were much worse. There were various sizes of piles of corpses lying all over the camp, some in between the huts. The compounds themselves had bodies lying about in them. The gutters were full and within the huts there were uncountable numbers of bodies, some even in the same bunks as the living. Near the crematorium were signs of filled-in mass graves, and outside to the left of the bottom compound was an open pit half-full of corpses. It had just begun to be filled. Some of the huts had bunks but not many, and they were filled absolutely to overflowing with prisoners in every state of emaciation and disease. There was not room for them to lie down at full length in each hut. In the most crowded there were anything from 600 to 1000 people in accommodation which should only have taken 100.” (Phillips)

            British action was swift, but a significant threat still lingered. The camp was in the midst of a Typhus outbreak— overcrowding and the threat of the front moving ever-closer had plunged the camp into disarray. The camp, whose medical services were already stretched thin (Kramer) were woefully insufficient to combat the rapid spread of disease. Medical student Michael John Hargrave was deployed to Bergen-Belsen to help assist in treating those affected— his account is perhaps one of the most detailed regarding living conditions for prisoners by the War’s end.

“There were no beds whatsoever and in this one room there were about 200 people lying on the floor. In some cases, they wore a few battered rags and in some cases they wore no clothes at all. They were all huddled together one next to the other. In many cases 1 blanket having to cover 3 people. The floor was covered in faeces and soaked in urine and the people lying on the floor were in just the same state - as they all had extremely severe diarrhoea and were all too weak to move.” (Hargrave)

Hargrave notes that any sort of medical intervention was “virtually unknown” (Hargrave) Bodies of those who had succumbed to the disease were yet unburied. Under British supervision, the dead were buried in mass graves; many of the barracks were burned to the ground.