On this day: Bergen-Belsen liberated

After liberation, more than 13,000 prisoners died from illness. Two weeks after it was liberated, Belsen was burnt to the ground by the British forces, in an effort to prevent the spread of typhus.

What Reverend Levy, chaplain to the British Army, told the JC after he visited soon after liberation: The stench reaches to high heaven, Death stalks abroad and no human power can stop the hand of the Angel of Death from claiming his victims…People walk around the camp looking like human skeletons. They have no flesh on their harried bones…they lie on the filthy floors clothed in rags and tatters. Lice and vermin are everywhere. When the liberating forces arrived they found corpses lying around the camp still unburied. The living lay in close proximity with the dead. Corpses were used as mattresses. There was no means of removing the dead; the living had no strength to drag the bodies out of the huts.

See more from the JC archives here.