StudioMde
Bergen Belsen, Documentation Center
BBC News; 15 April 1945
"British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen
British troops have entered the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds.
Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, is the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British. Details of the conditions inside are likely to horrify a public which until now has only heard limited descriptions from the camps in Poland freed by the Red Army.
The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women's bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.
From where we were, we could see the desperate plight of the inmates
People's War memories »
The gutters, too, were filled with dead bodies.
One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.
There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on.
There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions.
One of the British senior medical officers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn- Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. There were bodies with no flesh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed.
He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months.
He said typhus had caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Men and women had tried to keep themselves clean with dregs from coffee cups. Medical supplies were severely limited - there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice.
The only food available for the prisoners was turnip soup and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners to restore order among those desperate to get at the food stores.
Those prisoners who were too weak to get up and collect their food went without and died.
The camp commandant, who was described as "unashamed" at the camp conditions, has been placed under arrest. "
The Documentation Centre at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial opened in October 2007. This building holds all of the documents, photographs, film footage and objects associated with the history of the site that have already been collected by the Memorial, and all future acquisitions will be stored here as well. These resources are available to researchers and educators. Some of the material is displayed in the permanent exhibition that covers the history of the POW camps on Lüneburg Heath, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the DP camp.
The nearly 200-metre-long building lies outside the grounds of the former camp, but it protrudes a few metres into them, hovering over the former perimeter without touching the earth. The ground floor of the two-storey concrete building is bisected by a Stony Path that leads visitors from the forecourt of the Memorial to the cemetery and the site of the camp.
An information desk, bookshop and cafeteria are also located on the ground floor in the entrance hall at the front of the building. The Memorial’s archive and library can be found on the first floor. The permanent exhibition on the history of Bergen-Belsen covers two floors and around 1,500 square metres of space at the back of the building. The exhibition halls are sparsely designed, and the floor rises slightly towards the grounds of the former camp. A large panoramic window at the end of the building provides the only glimpse of the outside and makes the historical site itself a part of the exhibition.
At almost 200 meters long, the Documentation and Information Center at Bergen-Belsen Memorial, which is made almost entirely of concrete, is an unusual structure. There are two paths through the Documentation Center: one is an open passageway or “stony path” that leads directly to the grounds. The second leads visitors to the exhibition rooms, which document the history of the site from prisoner of war camp to concentration camp.
Client: Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten
GFA: 4,900 m²
Competition: 02/2003, 1st prize
Completion: 10/2007
Awards: BDA-Prize Lower-Saxony 2009
State of Lower Saxony Prize for Architecture 2008
Museum Prize Lower-Saxony 2009
Photographer: Klemens Ortmeyer, Stephan Falk
Nikon d800 panorama
Bergen Belsen, Documentation Center
BBC News; 15 April 1945
"British troops liberate Bergen-Belsen
British troops have entered the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.
Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds.
Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, is the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British. Details of the conditions inside are likely to horrify a public which until now has only heard limited descriptions from the camps in Poland freed by the Red Army.
The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women's bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.
From where we were, we could see the desperate plight of the inmates
People's War memories »
The gutters, too, were filled with dead bodies.
One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.
There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on.
There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions.
One of the British senior medical officers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn- Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. There were bodies with no flesh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed.
He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months.
He said typhus had caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Men and women had tried to keep themselves clean with dregs from coffee cups. Medical supplies were severely limited - there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice.
The only food available for the prisoners was turnip soup and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners to restore order among those desperate to get at the food stores.
Those prisoners who were too weak to get up and collect their food went without and died.
The camp commandant, who was described as "unashamed" at the camp conditions, has been placed under arrest. "
The Documentation Centre at the Bergen-Belsen Memorial opened in October 2007. This building holds all of the documents, photographs, film footage and objects associated with the history of the site that have already been collected by the Memorial, and all future acquisitions will be stored here as well. These resources are available to researchers and educators. Some of the material is displayed in the permanent exhibition that covers the history of the POW camps on Lüneburg Heath, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the DP camp.
The nearly 200-metre-long building lies outside the grounds of the former camp, but it protrudes a few metres into them, hovering over the former perimeter without touching the earth. The ground floor of the two-storey concrete building is bisected by a Stony Path that leads visitors from the forecourt of the Memorial to the cemetery and the site of the camp.
An information desk, bookshop and cafeteria are also located on the ground floor in the entrance hall at the front of the building. The Memorial’s archive and library can be found on the first floor. The permanent exhibition on the history of Bergen-Belsen covers two floors and around 1,500 square metres of space at the back of the building. The exhibition halls are sparsely designed, and the floor rises slightly towards the grounds of the former camp. A large panoramic window at the end of the building provides the only glimpse of the outside and makes the historical site itself a part of the exhibition.
At almost 200 meters long, the Documentation and Information Center at Bergen-Belsen Memorial, which is made almost entirely of concrete, is an unusual structure. There are two paths through the Documentation Center: one is an open passageway or “stony path” that leads directly to the grounds. The second leads visitors to the exhibition rooms, which document the history of the site from prisoner of war camp to concentration camp.
Client: Stiftung Niedersächsische Gedenkstätten
GFA: 4,900 m²
Competition: 02/2003, 1st prize
Completion: 10/2007
Awards: BDA-Prize Lower-Saxony 2009
State of Lower Saxony Prize for Architecture 2008
Museum Prize Lower-Saxony 2009
Photographer: Klemens Ortmeyer, Stephan Falk
Nikon d800 panorama