15 April 2025, 12:27

By Olivia Marks-Woldman

Eighty years ago today, British soldiers entered the gates of the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp in northern Germany.

What they witnessed would forever be seared into their conscience – and that of humanity. Thousands of emaciated prisoners, sick and barely alive, stumbled out of barracks riddled with disease.

Over 10,000 corpses lay unburied on the camp’s grounds. Of the six million Jews murdered during the Holocaust, more than 70,000 perished there.

Bergen-Belsen lacked the industrialised killing machinery of Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But it was still hell on earth.

For those British troops, the liberation on 15 April 1945 was not just a military operation;........

© LBC