Belsen

Site of a Nazi concentration camp in Lower Saxony, Germany.

Established 1943 it was not officially an extermination camp, but an outbreak of typhus 1945 caused thousands of deaths. When captured by British troops 13 April 1945 several thousand bodies lay around the camp and the remaining inmates were barely alive. It was the first camp to be taken by the Allies and newsreel footage of the conditions appalled the general public who, until then, had assumed that these camps were ordinary labour camps, albeit with a hard regime.