Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp

Mention of two visits I made two decades apart

Here are two official war photographs I found in a box at a Militaria Fair some years ago. They show the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The first shows the horror in the woods with lines of prisoners who died in the camp. The second, I believe, shows two soldiers saluting in one of the graveyards created after Liberation.

Along with a large group of fellow soldiers, I was taken to visit the site of the infamous camp in 1970. We were told that birds avoided the area and we heard no bird song. It was very sobering to visit the area and we were all very quiet on the journey back to barracks.

I went again in the 1990s while on assignment at a nearby barracks. Our guide was a long-serving Lt Colonel who was an expert in the subject. On entering the site, every visitor had to attend a presentation. Germans in one lecture room and other nationals in another. Our briefing lasted 30 minutes while the German presentation took 90 minutes. This time, the birds were singing in the trees.

At that time, German television was not permitted to show any programmes about the Holocaust. I was still in West Germany when, a couple of years later the ban was lifted. One of the first programmes to be broadcast was a documentary about Dachau Concentration Camp.