The story of this place
Bergen-Belsen on the Lüneburg Heath became a place of mass death in the war's final months, as tens of thousands of prisoners were force-marched here from camps in the east. Overcrowding, starvation and a typhus epidemic killed the inmates in staggering numbers; the diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot died here of typhus around February 1945, just weeks before liberation. When British troops entered on 15 April 1945 they found some 13,000 unburied corpses and 60,000 dying survivors, scenes filmed and broadcast that shocked the world. The British burned the disease-ridden barracks to the ground, so almost nothing built survives; today grassy mounds mark mass graves of 50,000 dead, and a documentation centre tells the story.