The liberation of Bergen-Belsen

On 15 April 1945, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany. They walked straight into a nightmare. The camp was overcrowded, with 60,000 starving and weakened Jews and prisoners of war from all over Europe. Many of them were more dead than alive. All around lay heaps of dead people. Even after the liberation, more than 13,000 prisoners still died.

The camp was rife with deadly diseases, such as typhus, dysentery, and tuberculosis, caused by poor hygiene and malnutrition. As the thousands of dead bodies were contagious, they had to be buried in a hurry. At first, the British forced the arrested SS officers and other guards to dig the graves; later, they also used bulldozers. The mayors of the towns near the camp were forced to stand at the edge of the graves and watch.

The British filmed and photographed the scene in order to show the rest of the world the terrible truth.