How Bergen-Belsen, Where Anne Frank Died, Was Different From Every Other Nazi Concentration Camp
A new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London chronicles the German camp complex’s history, from its origins housing prisoners of war to its afterlife holding displaced persons
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In the final months of World War II, as the Allies advanced on Berlin, the Nazis evacuated tens of thousands of Jewish prisoners from concentration camps in Central and Eastern Europe to Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany. As Bergen-Belsen’s population skyrocketed from roughly 7,300 in July 1944 to 41,000 in March 1945, living conditions rapidly deteriorated.
“In Auschwitz, people were murdered in the most sophisticated manner; in Belsen, they simply perished,” Holocaust survivor Anita Lasker-Wallfisch later recalled. “We sat about and waited and watched each other deteriorate.” Speaking with the BBC, she explained, “There were no gas chambers there, no need for gas chambers—you just died of disease, of starvation.” In total, around 70,000 people died in the Bergen-Belsen camp complex, among them Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who is now remembered as one of the most famous victims of the Holocaust.
Lasker-Wallfisch’s testimony features in “Traces of Belsen,” a new exhibition at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London. Opening just before the 80th anniversary of the camp’s liberation on April 15, 1945, the show draws on documents, art, artifacts and photographs to chronicle Bergen-Belsen’s lesser-known history. Initially founded as a prisoner-of-war camp, the site later housed Jews who were supposed to be swapped for German nationals held by the Allies, though few were ultimately released. After the war, a displaced persons camp established nearby assumed the name of the shuttered concentration camp.
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Surviving records of Bergen-Belsen are few and far between, as the Nazis destroyed much of the evidence documenting the camp’s operation, and the British soldiers who liberated the camp burned its barracks to control the spread of typhus. But testimony collected by the library, personal items preserved by survivors, art created by liberators and objects unearthed by archaeologists have all helped scholars piece together the camp’s story.
“‘Traces of Belsen’ takes a fresh look at a subject that many of us think we are familiar with, because of the images of overwhelming death and suffering that were broadcast to the world in April 1945,” says the library’s director, Toby Simpson, in a statement. “The more we look at the evidence that remains, however, the more we can see that the catastrophic conditions in Belsen during the last months of the war, which so appalled the camp’s liberators and the wider world, produced shocking impressions which tend to obscure as much as they reveal.”
According to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, the camp complex “differed from all other Nazi concentration camps in several key aspects.” Not officially designated as a concentration camp until December 1944, Bergen-Belsen included three main components established at different points during the war: the POW camp, the residence camp and the prisoners’ camp.
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The complex’s earliest camp opened in 1940, when the Nazis moved 600 French and Belgian POWs into barracks formerly used by construction workers at a military training base near the German village of Belsen. Some 20,000 Soviet POWs arrived at the camp, also known as Stalag 311, over the course of 1941. Lacking food and adequate housing, many slept outside in pits they dug themselves.
By the spring of 1942, around 14,000 Soviet POWs detained at Bergen-Belsen had died of starvation, disease and exposure. In the exhibition, these victims are commemorated through photographs owned by a local family who found the snapshots in the mail in 1942. Nobody knows who took the photos or who placed them in the family’s mailbox.
The next major phase in Bergen-Belsen’s existence began in 1943, when the Nazis disbanded Stalag 311 but kept its hospital open as a treatment center for POWs. Camp officials also forced 500 prisoners brought in from other concentration camps to construct a residence camp that housed Jewish civilians for potential prisoner swaps.
“These prisoners either had connections to places such as the United States of America or Palestine, or were viewed to be of particularly high value for other reasons,” notes the library on its Holocaust Explained portal. As a result, these “exchange Jews” received better treatment than their counterparts at other camps, enduring conditions that were “poor but sufferable,” in the words of historian Nikolaus Wachsmann. Most of these “exchange Jews” were never released.
The inmates who built the residence camp lived in a section of the complex known as the prisoners’ camp. After closing briefly in February 1944, the prisoners’ camp reopened to house sick and injured individuals transported to Bergen-Belsen from other camps, as well as thousands of Jewish women evacuated from Auschwitz-Birkenau, among them Anne Frank and her older sister, Margot Frank.
A diary kept by Ruth Wiener, daughter of the library’s founder, Alfred Wiener, features in the exhibition and represents the only contemporary document testifying to the Frank sisters’ presence at Bergen-Belsen. On December 20, 1944, Ruth, who’d known the pair back in Amsterdam, wrote, “Anne and Margot Frank in the other camp!” According to research conducted by historians at the Anne Frank House, the sisters died of typhus just two months later, in February 1945, not March as previously believed. “One day, they simply weren’t there anymore,” a fellow prisoner later recalled.
Anne and Margot’s arrival at Bergen-Belsen coincided with a major shift in how the camp was run. Josef Kramer, who’d also served as commandant of the Birkenau compound, assumed leadership of Bergen-Belsen in early December 1944. Nicknamed the “Beast of Belsen,” Kramer employed brutal policies that included depriving starving Jewish prisoners of food and instituting regular beatings. Under Kramer’s command, conditions worsened significantly, even for the “exchange Jews” who’d previously enjoyed relatively better treatment. Lack of food and clean water, poor sanitation, disease, starvation, and physical violence killed more than 18,000 prisoners in the month of March 1945 alone.
Today, Bergen-Belsen is best remembered as it was in April 1945, when British troops finally liberated its survivors. These soldiers found around 55,000 emaciated, severely ill prisoners left behind by the retreating Nazis, as well as thousands of rotting corpses.
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“The dead and the living were all together,” said medical assistant William Arthur Wood. “They hadn’t the energy to take the dead out, and there were so many piled outside … that it was hard to see, to pick out the dead from the living.” Despite British liberators’ best efforts, nearly 14,000 of the surviving prisoners died in the weeks immediately following liberation.
Eric Taylor, a London artist who witnessed the camp’s liberation, recorded victims’ stories in vivid paintings, nine of which are housed in the library’s collections. The works underscore the “paradox of ‘liberation,’” exhibition curator Barbara Warnock tells the Art Newspaper. “Liberation did not bring reprieve for those too ill or malnourished for freedom to be of any use. Under one portrait, Taylor left a handwritten inscription: ‘The unbelievable horror of Belsen was beyond human understanding.’”
In the United Kingdom, photographs of Nazi atrocities at Bergen-Belsen became “deeply ingrained in collective consciousness” as a symbol of Britain’s “triumph over ‘evil’” during World War II, wrote historian Rainer Schulze for the Conversation in 2015. “The liberation of Bergen-Belsen became separated from what the people held in this camp had had to endure, and why they had been incarcerated in the first place.”
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After liberation, some former prisoners remained in the area, moving to a displaced persons camp where they started to rebuild their lives. “Though the British attempted to name the new camp Hohne, the survivors refused to relinquish the name Bergen-Belsen,” notes the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.
In the exhibition, photographs taken by relief workers, as well as Yiddish-language materials published in the displaced persons camp, testify “to the ways in which Belsen became a site for the rebirth of Jewish life in Europe after the war,” says Warnock in the library statement. Survivors married and started families, in addition to establishing vocational and religious schools. Many united around the cause of Zionism, calling for Britain to allow Jewish refugees to emigrate to British-controlled Palestine and advocating for the establishment of a Jewish state.
The last residents of the displaced persons camp departed for new homes in August 1951. Today, a memorial and museum stand on the site of the former camp complex, commemorating the roughly 50,000 concentration camp prisoners and nearly 20,000 Soviet POWs who died on its grounds.
“Traces of Belsen” is on view at the Wiener Holocaust Library in London through July 10.
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