Bergen-Belsen concentration camp

Officially, the Germans listed this facility, near Hanover, as a Krankenlager, a sick camp or medical camp. It was, in fact, created as an internment camp in April 1943, but by July was a fully developed concentration camp. It differed from other such camps, however, in that it was divided into two sections. One was used for the incarceration of political prisoners and Jews of foreign nationality, who were being held, in effect, as hostages. The other section was a conventionally horrific concentration camp. By early 1945, Bergen-Belsen became a holding facility for many thousands of prisoners who had become too sick or weak for forced labor but who were, for various reasons, not "selected" for extermination. Soon, the camp was disastrously overcrowded by some 60,000 inmates. This condition gave rise to a typhoid epidemic, in which approximately 18,000 prisoners died in March 1945 alone. SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, Bergen- Belsen's third commandant, was also its most infamous. He became known as the Beast of Belsen. His answer to the typhoid epidemic was simply to starve the prisoners. He reasoned that typhoid was spread by feces and that if prisoners did not eat, they would not defecate. The most famous victim of typhoid in Bergen-Belsen was Anne Frank, the young author of a diary that would gain her worldwide posthumous fame after her father published it in 1947. The camp was liberated by the British in April 1945. They found 38,500 living inmates (of whom about 28,000 subsequently died), mass graves holding some 40,000 bodies, and mountains of an estimated 10,000 unburied dead.