Bergen-Belsen,

Camp in the concentration camp system of Nazi Germany. Bergen-Belsen was located in Lower Saxony, northern Germany, near the city of Celle. The camp was officially established in April 1943 as an Aufenthaltslager (detention camp) for holding persons who were designated for exchange with German nationals in Allied countries whom the Germans wanted to repatriate. A prisoner-of-war camp on the site, Stalag 311, was partially cleared to make room for the new camp.From its inception, Bergen-Belsen came under the SS Wirtschafts￾verwaltungshauptamt (Economic-Administrative Main Office; WVHA), which was in charge of the administration of concentration camps. Its first commandant was Hauptsturmfuhrer (later promoted to Sturmbannfuhrer) Adolf Haas. Five hundred Jewish prisoners from the Buchenwald and Natzweiler camps were taken to Bergen-Belsen to work on the construction of the camp; they were not candidates for exchange and belonged to the Baukommando (construction detachment), whose task was to construct facilities for the intake of the persons who, on the face of it, were candidates for exchange. In the course of the first eighteen months of the camp's existence, five satellite camps were set up, unconnected with one another, as follows: A "prisoners' camp" (Haftlingslager) for the first 500 prisoners who had been brought in for construction of the camp. This was the first satellite camp to be built at Bergen-Belsen; conditions in the camp were among the worst possible, and the mortality rate was very high. The camp was closed on February 23, 1944, and the few surviving prisoners were transferred to Sachsenhausen. The "special camp" (Sonderlager). In mid-June 1943, two transports of Jews from Poland (mainly from Warsaw, Lvov, and Krakow), totaling 2,400 persons, were taken to this camp; these were Jews who had papers (promesas) in their possession, issued by various - mostly South American - countries. In late October 1943, 1,700 of these Jews were deported to Auschwitz, where they were all immediately killed. Another 350 suffered the same fate in early 1944. This left 350 detainees in the camp, of whom 266 were in possession of immigration permits to Palestine, 34 were United States citizens, and 50 had South American papers. These prisoners were not assigned to work teams, and no contact was permitted between them and other groups of Bergen-Belsen prisoners. The "neutral camp" (Neutralenlager). This camp contained two barracks in which 350 Jewish prisoners were housed from late July 1944 to early March 1945. The prisoners were nationals of neutral countries, among them 155 Spanish, 105 Turkish, 35 Argentine, and 19 Portuguese citizens.Conditions in this camp were better than in any other part of Bergen-Belsen.The prisoners here were not put to work, enjoyed better nourishment and sanitary conditions, and were treated by the SS with less cruelty than were prisoners in the other satellite camps. The "star camp" (Sternenlager). This was the largest of the five satellite camps, containing eighteen barracks. It housed Jewish prisoners who ostensibly were designated for exchange (Austauschjuden, or exchange Jews). These prisoners did not wear the usual concentration camp uniform and were permitted to wear their own clothes, but they had to wear a yellow badge (a Magen David, or Star of David, from which came the name "star camp"). Men and women lived in separate barracks, but members of the same family were able to meet. Most of the prisoners in the "star camp" were Jews from the Netherlands; in the period from January to September 1944, eight transports from the Westerbork camp in the Netherlands arrived in Bergen-Belsen, made up of 3,670 persons who were classified as Austauschjuden. In the first half of 1944, the "star camp" also took in small transports of Jews from various other countries. These included 200 Jews from Tunisia, Tripoli, and Benghazi who until then had been held in the Fossoli di Carpi camp in Italy; 200 Jewish women from the Drancy camp in France, whose husbands were French prisoners of war being held by the Germans; and several hundred Jews from Yugoslavia and Albania. According to a count taken on July 31, 1944, the "star camp" contained a total of 4,100 Jewish prisoners classified as Austauschjuden. The "Hungarian camp" (Ungarnlager), which was set up on July 8, 1944, and held 1,684 Jews from Hungary - the transport organized by Dr.Rezso (Rudolf) Kasztner. Here, too, the prisoners wore their own clothes but were forced to display the yellow badge.Only a few of the Jews who were brought to Bergen-Belsen as candidates for exchange were in fact set free in exchange deals (see exchange: Jews and Germans). On July 10, 1944, 222 Jews with immigration certificates to Palestine landed at the Haifa port. A few weeks later, on August 21, 318 Jews from the "Hungarian camp" reached Switzerland, followed by another 1,365 in December; on January 25, 1945, 136 Jews with South American papers also reached Switzerland.Beginning in March 1944, Bergen-Belsen gradually became a "regular" concentration camp, the Germans transferring to it prisoners from other concentration camps who were classified as ill and unfit to work (Arbeitsunfahige). The first such group came in late March 1944 and consisted of 1,000 sick prisoners from the Dora camp. They were put into a new section of the camp where the sanitary conditions were extremely poor; they received no blankets, no medical attention, and only minute food rations.Nearly all of them died within a short period; on the day of the camp's liberation, only 57 of the original 1,000 were still alive. More transports of prisoners "unfit for work" kept arriving from various camps, up to the end of 1944, most of them made up of Hungarian Jews. The majority were housed in the former "prisoners' camp", where conditions were at their worst and the mortality rate was the highest. Of the several thousand prisoners brought to this section of the camp in 1944 (the precise figure is unknown), 820 died in the period from April to June alone. Also transferred to this section of the camp were German convicts from the Dora camp, who were appointed "block elders" (Blockalteste) and Kapos (see kapo), and who treated the Jewish prisoners under their authority with great brutality, causing their situation to deteriorate sharply. The prisoners also suffered from the sadistic practices of the camp doctor, Obersturmbannfuhrer Dr. Karl Jager, who forced them to keep running for long stretches of time. In summer 1944 some 200 prisoners were killed by phenol injections.In August 1944 a new section was added, to serve as a women's camp, consisting of twelve barracks; 4,000 Jewish women prisoners from Hungary and Poland were brought there, but after a short stay they were Senton forced labor to the Buchenwald and flossenburg satellite camps. Most of the women were sent back to Bergen-Belsen, sick or exhausted by the hard labor that had been forced on them. In September and October of 1944, transports of Jewish prisoners from the Plaszow camp, and 3,000 Jewish women prisoners from Auschwitz, arrived at Bergen-Belsen; they were housed in the "star camp" in new barracks put up for them, with no water, no beds, and no other facilities of any kind. Among these prisoners were Anne Frank and her sister Margot; in March 1945 both girls succumbed to the typhus epidemic that was then raging in the camp.On December 2, 1944, the camp commandant, Adolf Haas, was replaced by Hauptsturmfuhrer Josef kramer. A census taken that day showed that the camp population was 15,257 persons, of whom some 8,000 were women.Kramer's first step was to convert Bergen-Belsen officially into a concentration camp. The residues of self-administration that still existed in the "star camp" were abolished, and the internal management of the camp was put into the hands of Blockalteste and Kapos, as was done in all the other concentration camps. A final and complete deterioration of the conditions under which the prisoners were living in the camp set in when tens of thousands of prisoners poured in - survivors of the death marches of prisoners who had been evacuated from camps in the east. These included 20,000 women prisoners from the Auschwitz and Buchenwald satellite camps, some of whom had passed through the Gross-Rosen camp on the death march to Bergen-Belsen.In the period from January to March 1945 there were more death marches, which brought thousands of male prisoners from the Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald camps to Bergen-Belsen. The camp administration did not lift a finger to house the prisoners who were streaming in. Most of them had no roof over their heads, and were without water and food. There was now total chaos in the camps, and a typhus epidemic was at its height; in the month of March alone, 18,168 prisoners perished in the camp, and the number of deaths for the period from January to mid-April was 35,000.On April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British army. There were sixty thousand prisoners in the camp, most of them in a critical condition.Thousands of unburied bodies were strewn all over the camp grounds. The sight put the British soldiers into a state of shock. The British had not anticipated the immediate rescue requirements, and in the first five days following liberation, fourteen thousand persons died; another fourteen thousand succumbed in the following weeks.After liberation, Bergen-Belsen became the site of a displaced persons' camp, the British army medical corps helping in the physical rehabilitation of the former prisoners. The displaced persons' camp was in existence up to 1951, with the inmates, under the leadership of Josef Rosensaft, managing to organize a lively social, cultural, and political life in the camp.The trial of forty-eight members of the staff of Bergen-Belsen, among them sixteen women, by a British military court was held in Luneburg, Germany, from September 17 to November 17, 1945. Eleven of the accused - including the camp commandant, Josef Kramer - were sentenced to death, and on December 12, 1945, they were executed.