Never forget!
70 years ago today, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, where around 70,000 people died during the Holocaust.
The scenes that greeted 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."
The 15-year-old Anne Frank was among the thousands to die there from typhus, just a few months before the camp was liberated.
40 years ago I too visited the site, whilst working in nearby Hannover. I will never forget!
Never forget!
70 years ago today, British troops liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany, where around 70,000 people died during the Holocaust.
The scenes that greeted 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."
The 15-year-old Anne Frank was among the thousands to die there from typhus, just a few months before the camp was liberated.
40 years ago I too visited the site, whilst working in nearby Hannover. I will never forget!