Construction of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi camp near Celle in northern Germany. It was opened as a prisoner-of-war camp and later, from 1943, partly became a concentration camp, at first as a holding camp for Jews who might be exchanged for German prisoners abroad. In the last months of the war it received huge numbers of prisoners evacuated from other camps, and conditions deteriorated catastrophically, with overcrowding, hunger and epidemics of typhus. Tens of thousands of people died there, among them the diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot. British troops liberated the camp in April 1945 and found thousands of unburied bodies and gravely ill survivors. Film taken by the British made the horrors of the Nazi camps known to the world.

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