April 15, 1944:
- "British troops reach the Bergen-Belsen, Germany, concentration camp and find 60,000 survivors and 27,000 unburied corpses.
Following liberation, starvation and typhus will claim about 500 inmates every day for ten days; See April 15-17, 1945. - "British troops close on Bremen and Hamburg, Germany.
- "Soviet forces are 35 miles east of Berlin and 60 miles east of Dresden, Germany.
- "At Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen, Germany, 57,000 inmates--17,000 of them women--are marched westward by the SS.
Once under way, many will be shot and/or die of exhaustion, and others, including 21-year-old Mila Racine, will be killed during Allied bomb attacks aimed at nearby targets. - "A deportation train from Vienna, the final one organized by Adolf Eichmann's staff, arrives at the Theresienstadt, Czechoslovakia, camp/ghetto with 109 Jews.
- April 15-17: "A small contingent of British troops at the Bergen-Belsen, Germany, camp is unable to prevent Hungarian SS guards from murdering 72 Jewish and 11 non-Jewish prisoners."
"When the British liberated the Bergen-Belsen, Germany, concentration camp on April 15, 1945, they discovered tens of thousands of unburied bodies abandoned by the Germans.
The British had no choice but to bury the corpses in mass graves.
Curtis Mitchell, an American who visited the camp at this time, described the Germans who were forced to load the bodies into trucks in preparation for mass burial as behaving 'just as if they were dumping garbage.' "
"Josef Kramer, glum and in shackles, was the commandant of Bergen-Belsen at the end of the war.
In 1944 he had served as chief of Auschwitz II, the death camp, during the annihilation of Hungary's Jews.
He admitted that he had personally gassed prisoners while serving as the commandant of the Natzweiler, Germany, camp.
On November 17, 1945, he was sentenced to death for his crimes."
"Inmates in the camps were forced to live under incredibly filthy conditions that often led to disease and infestation by parasites.
These children at Bergen-Belsen take their first baths in months."
- Bergen-Belsen
"The notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, near Celle in northern Germany, began operations early in 1943. It was designed to house approximately 10,000 Jewish prisoners.
The collapse of the German war effort and the consequent closure of camps throughout Eastern Europe forced tens of thousands of inmates to Bergen-Belsen.
When the camp was liberated on April 15, 1945, by the British Army, more than 60,000 emaciated and diseased human beings occupied the grounds.
"The vile living conditions at Bergen-Belsen were similar to those at the camps of Eastern Europe: Food, shelter, and sanitary facilities were entirely inadequate.
The declining health of the inmates resulted in thousands being murdered by lethal injections during the summer of 1944.
"As Bergen-Belsen's camp population swelled in 1945, the situation deteriorated rapidly.
Camp officials and the facilities were simply overwhelmed.
All efforts to organize and feed the prisoners broke down completely.
When British soldiers arrived in April, they were greeted by an unimaginably grisly scene.
Corpses were rotting on the ground.
Barracks built to house 100 prisoners were stuffed with more than 1,000 typhus-ridden, excrement-covered people.
Death by disease and starvation claimed 14,000 lives between April 15 and June 20, 1945."
"Known as "the SS woman without uniform," Hilde Lobauer embodied evil to the prisoners of Bergen-Belsen.
A political prisoner of the Nazis, Lobauer chose to side with her captors, indulging her penchant for cruelty with a leather whip and a cane.
Her sadism earned her a promotion to internee in charge of a section of the camp.
Following the war, she was tried at Nuremberg and sentenced to ten years in prison, though she was released in July 1950."
"This survivor of Bergen-Belsen was found in agony at liberation.
Internment in Hitler's camps had long-term--often calamitous--psychological and physical effects upon survivors."