Name: Interview with an SS-Guard after the Liberation of Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen - 15 April 1945 | Videos | Gan Jing World - Technology for Humanity | Video & Movie Streaming
Uploaded: 2023-12-08T18:46:07.568Z
Duration: 4 min 22 s
Description: Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp set up by the SS in April 1943. It was located on the area ... | Videos | Gan Jing World - Technology for Humanity | Video & Movie Streaming

German WWII Archive

https://video1-us-west.cloudokyo.cloud/video/v6/ee/92/50/ee92501c-17b7-4c34-a55e-24d42de9cbbd/master.m3u8

Bergen-Belsen was a concentration camp set up by the SS in April 1943. 

It was located on the area of a large POW camp used by the Wehrmacht from September 1939 onwards, and parts of the area where handed over to the SS in 1943. 

Bergen-Belsen was not a normal concentration camp, it was initally designated as a "civilian internment camp", and in June 1943 a "holding camp". 
It was initially intended to hold Jews there who were seen suitable for a possible exchange with German nationals abroad, or maybe even with German POWs. Between Summer 1943 and December 1944, at least 14,600 Jews were transported to Bergen and were treated slightly better than in other camps. 

In March 1944, a part of the camp was designated as "recovery camp", where inmates from other camps, fit for work, who became sick were supposed to recover and then return back to their original camps.
In reality, however, due to a lack of medical care, food, and widespread diseases, many of the already weakend prisoners died in Belsen. 

In January 1945, the remaining parts of the POW camp where handed over to the SS, and Bergen-Belsen was increased in size, as camps in the East where evacuated of prisoners. In July 1944,  7,300 prisoners where held at Bergen, that number rose to 15,000 by December, to 22,000 in February 1945 and finally to 60,000 in April 1945. The camp was only designed to hold 10,000 people, and as a consequence of the overcrowding, thousands of prisoners died of diseases, mainly typhus, but also tuberculosis, typhoid fever, dysentery. Additionally, many prisoners starved, as there was a grave lack of food. 

When the British army advanced in the area in April 1945, the Germans agreed to a temporary truce on April 13, designating an area around the camp as neutral zone, with most of the SS guards being allowed to leave. Himmler already agreed handing over the camp to the British on April 11th.
When the British soldiers entered the camp, they found around 60,000 inmates still there, most sick and starving, in addition to around 13,000 unburied corpses. 

This made Bergen-Belsen a special case; while the SS usually tried to remove all prisoners and bodies from camps before the enemy reached them and tried to conceal the atrocities commited there, no such thing was attempted in Belsen. For example, when the Red Army entered Auschwitz, they "only" found around 7,000 prisoners and 600 unburied corpses. 

The images from Bergen are particulary gruesome, with piles of disease-ridden, starved bodies lying around everywhere. 

Despite British medical care, many prisoners where already too weak, with a further 13,994 former inmates dying after the liberation. All in all, around 70,000 prisoners died in Belsen before the liberation, this includes a large number of Soviet POWs (around 50,000) which were mostly starved to death.

This audio is an interview, conducted by British journalist Patrick Gordon Walker (1907-1980) who worked for the German service of the BBC from 1940 onwards, and organized the daily BBC broadcasts to Germany from 1942 to 1944.

In 1945, he travled with the British forces to Germany, where he broadcasted  from the liberation of Bergen-Belsen, which included interviews with survivors and SS-guards.

This is one of these interviews, held with an SS-NCO called Joachim Wolf (1910-1945), who served in Bergen-Belsen for four months (according to camp documents, he himself said it was only two weeks).
Wolf describes in which camps he served and what he saw there, which includes Auschwitz, Dachau and Belsen.

Wolf would later be made to bury the corpses of former inmates, where he would infect himself with Thypus; he died on May 30th, 1945. 

Walker would go on to become a British MP from October 1945 to October 1964, and again from March 1966 to Februaruy 1974. He also served as British Education secretary from August 1967 to April 1968, and Foreign Secretary from October 1964 to January 1965.
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Subtitles made by me.

Interview with an SS-Guard after the Liberation of Concentration Camp Bergen-Belsen - 15 April 1945

German WWII Archive

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