The portraits of the Bergen-Belsen camp guards provide a haunting illustration of this concept. Despite their mundane and unremarkable appearance in photographs, these individuals played key roles in the execution of genocide, highlighting the chilling reality of how ordinary individuals can become instruments of profound evil. Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi German concentration camp located near the villages of Bergen and Belsen, approximately 10 miles (16 km) northwest of Celle, Germany. Established in 1943, it was initially intended as a detention camp for Jews meant to be exchanged for Germans held in Allied territory. The camp was built on part of an existing prisoner-of-war camp. Bergen-Belsen consisted of five satellite camps: a prison camp, a special camp for Jews holding papers from South American countries, a “star camp” where prisoners wore yellow Stars of David but not uniforms and were intended for exchange with the West, a camp for Jews holding citizenship papers from neutral countries, and a camp housing Hungarian Jews. Current estimates suggest that approximately 120,000 prisoners passed through Bergen-Belsen during its operation from 1943 to 1945. Due to the SS’s destruction of the camp’s records, only about 55,000 of these individuals are known by name. The conditions and treatment of prisoners varied significantly across different sections of the camp. Inmates in the exchange camp generally received better treatment compared to those in other sections, particularly in the early days. Bergen-Belsen did not have gas chambers, as mass executions were carried out in other camps. However, the conditions at Bergen-Belsen worsened dramatically after the death marches of the winter of 1945—forced evacuations of prisoners from concentration and extermination camps in the east. Initially designed to accommodate around 10,000 prisoners, the camp’s capacity soared to approximately 60,000 by the end of the war, due to the influx of Jewish prisoners evacuated from Auschwitz and other eastern camps. These newly arrived prisoners faced dire shortages of food and shelter. From January to mid-April 1945, more than 35,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen due to starvation, overwork, disease, and a severe typhus epidemic. The living conditions were among the most appalling in any Nazi camp, contributing to the high death toll. Anne Frank, whose wartime diary later became world-famous, died of typhus at Bergen-Belsen in March 1945. Some 28,000 prisoners died of disease and other causes in the weeks after the British army liberated the camp on April 15, 1945. The British were forced to bury thousands of corpses in mass graves hastily excavated on the site. Bergen-Belsen was the first major Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by the Western Allies, and its horrors gained instant notoriety. The scenes that greeted the liberating British troops were described by the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby, who accompanied them: …Here over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people. You could not see which was which… The living lay with their heads against the corpses and around them moved the awful, ghostly procession of emaciated, aimless people, with nothing to do and with no hope of life, unable to move out of your way, unable to look at the terrible sights around them … Babies had been born here, tiny wizened things that could not live … A mother, driven mad, screamed at a British sentry to give her milk for her child, and thrust the tiny mite into his arms, then ran off, crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days. This day at Belsen was the most horrible of my life. Many former SS staff members who survived the typhus epidemic at Bergen-Belsen were prosecuted by the British military during the Belsen Trial. Throughout its operation as a concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen employed at least 480 individuals as guards or members of the commandant’s staff, including approximately 45 women. From September 17 to November 17, 1945, a military tribunal in Lüneburg put 45 of these individuals on trial. The defendants included Josef Kramer, the camp’s former commandant, along with 16 other male SS members, 16 female SS guards, and 12 former kapos—one of whom fell ill during the proceedings. Among them were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Hertha Ehlert, Ilse Lothe, Johanna Bormann and Fritz Klein. Eleven of the defendants were sentenced to death. They included Kramer, Volkenrath and Klein. The executions by hanging took place on December 13, 1945, in Hamelin. Fourteen defendants were acquitted (one was excluded from the trial due to illness). Of the remaining 19, one was sentenced to life in prison but he was executed for another crime. Eighteen were sentenced to prison for periods of one to 15 years; however, most of these sentences were subsequently reduced significantly on appeals or pleas for clemency. By June 1955, the last of those sentenced in the Belsen trial had been released. Ten other members of the Belsen personnel were tried by later military tribunals in 1946 and 1948, with five of them being executed. (Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons / Upscaled and enhanced by RHP). Notify me of new posts by email.
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