The Darkest Chapter of the Nazi Camp Bergen-Belsen (Hard to Watch)
When British troops entered Bergen-Belsen in April 1945, they did not find gas chambers or crematoria operating at full capacity. Instead, they uncovered something equally horrifying: more than 10,000 decomposing corpses piled under the open sky and tens of thousands of prisoners reduced to living skeletons, covered in festering sores, delirious with fever and hunger. The camp reeked of death, the ground was a mixture of mud, excrement, and decaying flesh, and there was no potable water, no food, no doctors—only silence and death.
This was Bergen-Belsen. The final months of the Third Reich had become a nightmare sustained by denial, fanaticism, and complete collapse. As the Allies advanced like a steamroller, trains filled with refugees, wounded soldiers, and prisoners crammed like cattle rolled ahead of them. Inside the camp itself, the Nazi system had disintegrated; Bergen-Belsen had transformed from a transit and internment camp into a hellish trap with no escape.
In this article, inspired by the detailed and harrowing account by The Soldier’s Diary CZ, I will take you through the tragic story of Bergen-Belsen—a place where death came not through gas or bullets but through neglect, starvation, and disease. This is a story about the collapse of humanity and the slow, agonizing demise of tens of thousands of innocent people, including the famous Anne Frank and her sister Margot.
🚂 From Transit Camp to Death Trap: The Transformation of Bergen-Belsen
Bergen-Belsen was not originally designed as a concentration camp. Founded in 1940, it began as a camp for British and French prisoners of war. Later, it expanded to house Soviet prisoners, and by 1943, it was under the direct control of the SS, officially becoming a concentration camp. Initially, it served as a transit camp for special prisoners, including Jews who might be used for propaganda or prisoner exchanges.
However, everything changed dramatically towards the end of 1944. As the Soviet Red Army advanced from the east, the SS hurriedly evacuated camps in Poland, Lithuania, Hungary, and eastern Germany. Tens of thousands of prisoners were transported deep into Germany, often in overcrowded, open freight trains without food, water, or medical care. Bergen-Belsen became one of the main destinations for these forced evacuations.
At its peak, the camp was designed to hold 8,000 to 10,000 prisoners. By early 1945, over 50,000 had been crammed into the camp — a catastrophic overcrowding that instantly overwhelmed the infrastructure. Wooden barracks meant for 100 people were packed with 400 to 600 prisoners, forced to sleep standing, squatting, or piled on top of each other. The buildings were freezing in winter, sweltering in summer, with broken windows and no ventilation.
Hygiene facilities collapsed under the strain. Latrines overflowed, and prisoners resorted to relieving themselves in corners or rusty tins. The ground became a filthy morass of mud, excrement, blood, and human remains. Infestations of lice, rats, and disease were rampant. Clothes were filthy and unchanged for months, open wounds festered without treatment, and many prisoners wore the same rags soaked with urine and pus.
This was no accident or mere logistical failure; it was a deliberate form of extermination through neglect. Bergen-Belsen did not kill with gas or bullets—it killed with starvation, disease, and abandonment.
🩸 The Slow Death: Starvation and Disease as Instruments of Extermination
Unlike Auschwitz or Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen lacked gas chambers or fully functioning crematoria. Death came through a merciless process of attrition. Prisoners arrived already weakened from their transport and previous camps, only to be thrown into an environment where survival was nearly impossible.
Food rations were negligible or nonexistent. Prisoners often went entire days consuming nothing but buckets of filthy water. When food was available, it was mostly watery soup with floating vegetable scraps or a spoonful of rancid margarine. Many prisoners’ stomachs had shrunk so much that even minimal food caused painful cramps, vomiting, or collapse.
The psychological toll was as brutal as the physical one. Hunger drove prisoners to madness—hallucinating food, talking to themselves, gnawing on wood or scraps of cloth, and even licking mud in desperate search for salt. Mothers tried to feed their starving children with bits of their own meager rations, sometimes fainting in the effort. Fights over crusts of bread erupted into savage violence. Taking even a single crumb from a dying prisoner could mean death.
Amidst this horror, children were born in the camp, but their chances of survival were nil. Mothers were too malnourished to produce milk, and newborns were tiny, with sunken eyes and translucent skin. Often the only relief was to hold them close until they stopped crying and slipped away into death.
Starvation was compounded by rampant disease. Typhus, dysentery, scurvy, and exhaustion ravaged the population. But the most devastating was typhus—a highly contagious and deadly fever spread by lice, fleas, and contaminated clothes. The camp’s overcrowding, filth, and lack of hygiene created a perfect breeding ground for the disease.
By early 1945, the camp was engulfed in a typhus epidemic. Prisoners burned with high fevers, covered in purple spots, writhing in pain, vomiting, and hallucinating. Many screamed for their families or repeated nonsense phrases. The disease destroyed minds before bodies, leading to organ failure and death. Medical care was nonexistent; prisoner doctors did their best with no medicines, no gloves, and no disinfectants. Alcohol and antiseptics had run out months earlier.
During the epidemic’s peak, it is estimated that at least 35,000 people died from typhus alone in just eight weeks. Bodies piled up inside the barracks and outside in the open, often left to rot among the living. Prisoners would sometimes sleep between corpses to steal a bit of warmth, blurring the line between the living and the dead.
🧟♂️ Life and Death Inside the Barracks: The Human Tragedy Unfolds
Inside the barracks, the scene was apocalyptic. Prisoners were reduced to shadows of their former selves—skin stretched taut over bones, faces sunken and hollow, eyes wide and unblinking. Many were too weak to stand or even sit up. Some babbled incoherently, others laughed or sang children’s songs as they drifted toward death.
Hygiene was nonexistent. There was no soap, no clean water, no laundry. Lice crawled over every inch of skin, spreading typhus relentlessly. Rats bit sleeping prisoners, and the stench of decay was overwhelming. The ground was soaked with urine, feces, blood, and vomit. The air hung heavy with the smell of rot and death.
The SS guards, many of them young or elderly men who had lost all sense of control, abandoned any pretense of order. They rarely entered the barracks, instead delegating authority to prisoner functionaries known as kapos. These kapos were often brutal, enforcing discipline with cruelty, aware that survival depended on suppressing any resistance.
Prisoners fought over scraps, stole from each other, and sometimes resorted to cannibalism in the most desperate cases. Sleeping meant risking theft of your few belongings. Weakness was a death sentence. Every day was a battle against hunger, disease, and despair.
🎄 The Stark Contrast: Life for SS Officers and Guards
While prisoners endured unimaginable suffering, the SS officers and guards lived in stark contrast. They occupied separate barracks with clean beds, heating, and regular food supplies. Their kitchens operated without interruption, serving meals of meat, white bread, coffee, and sausages—luxuries denied to prisoners.
They maintained military routines, exercised, played cards, listened to music, and even celebrated Christmas with decorated trees, sweets, mulled wine, and caroling. While thousands of prisoners starved and died just meters away, the SS enjoyed relative comfort and normalcy.
The camp commander, Josef Kramer, known later as the "Beast of Belsen," epitomized this cruel divide. He lived comfortably in a building separated from the prisoners’ area, with food, wine, and leisure. He oversaw the camp with cold bureaucratic efficiency, signing orders, scheduling punishments, and maintaining discipline as if the Third Reich were still fully operational.
The guards were indifferent to the prisoners’ suffering. They ordered prisoners to remove corpses, often under threat of death, and watched as typhus spread unchecked. Some guards were reportedly disturbed by what they saw, but most became numb or actively participated in the cruelty.
🕯️ Anne Frank and the Final Days of Bergen-Belsen
Among the tens of thousands who perished in Bergen-Belsen were Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Deported from Auschwitz in late 1944, they arrived at Bergen-Belsen already weakened by months of imprisonment. The chaotic, overcrowded, and disease-ridden camp was a far cry from the secret annex in Amsterdam where Anne had hidden.
Anne and Margot were placed in the "small women’s camp," a fenced-off zone within Bergen-Belsen. Food was scarce and often moldy, water contaminated, and disease rampant. Their mother had died earlier in Auschwitz, and their father, Otto Frank, was in the main camp, unaware of their fate.
Margot fell ill first, succumbing to typhus and starvation. Anne followed shortly after, weakened and alone. Witnesses recall Anne as a frail figure, wrapped in filthy blankets, begging for food through the barbed wire fences. Despite the horror surrounding her, Anne reportedly shared what little food she had with other prisoners.
The exact date of Anne’s death is unknown but is estimated to have occurred in February or March 1945, mere weeks before the camp’s liberation by British forces.
🛑 Liberation and Aftermath: The World Confronts Bergen-Belsen
On April 15, 1945, British troops entered Bergen-Belsen and were met with a scene of indescribable horror. Over 10,000 corpses lay unburied, and approximately 60,000 prisoners were alive but in critical condition. The smell of decay hung thick in the air, and typhus was still raging.
Many British soldiers were unprepared for what they encountered. At least 14 soldiers contracted typhus themselves, some fatally. The military swiftly implemented quarantine measures, disinfected the camp with DDT, and set up field hospitals and kitchens. Despite these efforts, hundreds of prisoners continued to die daily in the weeks following liberation.
Photographs and films taken by the British documented the horrors of Bergen-Belsen with meticulous detail. Images of emaciated children with wide, unblinking eyes, women clutching the bodies of their dead children, and mountains of corpses shocked the world and became some of the first visual evidence of the Holocaust's atrocities.
⚖️ Justice Served: The Belsen Trial and the Fate of the Perpetrators
Following liberation, dozens of SS guards and collaborators were arrested and put on trial in what became known as the Belsen Trial. Held in Lüneburg from September to November 1945, this British military tribunal was one of the first post-war war crimes trials focused on individual acts of cruelty rather than high-ranking Nazi officials.
A total of 45 defendants—24 men and 21 women—stood accused of murder, torture, and neglect. Among the most notorious was Josef Kramer, the camp commander, and Irma Grese, a young female guard infamous for her sadism and brutality. Both were sentenced to death by hanging, along with several others, including Juana Bormann, who was known for using trained dogs to attack prisoners.
The executions took place on December 13, 1945, in Hamelin prison. Witnesses described the condemned as calm and resolute, showing no remorse for their actions. Their deaths symbolized a measure of justice for the thousands who had perished under their watch.
🕯️ Reflections on Bergen-Belsen: A Testament to Human Suffering and Resilience
Bergen-Belsen was not a death camp in the traditional sense; it was not a factory of industrialized murder like Auschwitz with its gas chambers and crematoria. Instead, it was a place where death came slowly, silently, and relentlessly through starvation, disease, and neglect. It was a space where human dignity was stripped away, where thousands died in mud and filth, abandoned by a collapsing regime that no longer cared.
The camp’s horrors were a testament to the depths of human cruelty but also to the resilience of those who survived. The stories of prisoners like Anne Frank, who despite unimaginable suffering retained their humanity, remind us of the importance of remembering and bearing witness.
The legacy of Bergen-Belsen continues to challenge us to confront the consequences of hatred, indifference, and dehumanization. It serves as a stark reminder that the slow death of neglect can be as deadly as bullets or gas, and that the moral collapse of a society can lead to unimaginable tragedy.
📚 Final Thoughts
Writing about Bergen-Belsen is a difficult task. The images and stories are heavy, the scale of suffering almost incomprehensible. Yet it is essential that we remember this dark chapter of history. The camp was a symbol of the Nazi regime’s final collapse and a haunting reminder of what happens when humanity is abandoned.
Thanks to the detailed research and narration by The Soldier’s Diary CZ, we can better understand the complex and tragic reality of Bergen-Belsen. It was a place where death did not come swiftly but lingered, where lives were extinguished by starvation, disease, and the cold indifference of those in power.
May these stories never be forgotten, and may they inspire us to uphold human dignity and justice in the face of hatred and cruelty.
