Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp
The German concentration camp named Belsen (full, Bergen-Belsen) was one of the most cruel and vicious camps there was. Although through most of its history it wasn�t an extermination camp, it was one of the worst camps to live in. People were brought in from all over, and if you broke one little, unimportant rule you could be put to death. If someone survived for two weeks then they were very lucky. Because life in Belsen was harsh, German soldiers had no respect for the people in it, and there were people coming in from all around for no reason, it may have been the worst concentration camp to live in.
Life in Belsen was just as harsh, if not worse, than all the other concentration camps. Throughout most of its history Belsen wasn�t an extermination camp. It had no gas chambers, but it did have a crematorium for disposal of bodies. In fact, until late 1944, it housed fewer than 10,000 inmates. There was a gallows near the camp�s entrance planted for maximum visibility. Inmates would be sent to it for very minor offenses, that is, if they weren�t just shot on the spot, beaten to death, or injected with some sort of poison. Life became especially harsh in 1945 when the two sections at Belsen, built to house 8,000 people, were filled with 67,000 people. The average life expectancy of a prisoner who entered the camp in the spring of 1945 was only twelve days, and according to a British medical report, 27,000 people died there in March of 1945. Belsen wasn�t just a bad place to live, it was a bad place to die.
German soldiers had no respect or care for the people in the concentration camp. There was no mercifully quick death from gassing or mass execution. Death came in numbers just as appalling as Auschwitz, just as deliberately but even more disgracefully, by mass starvation, through diseases born of starvation, overcrowding, an dysentery, tuberculosis, pneumonia, typhus, and even more diseases came as a result of lack of sanitation. Although they had ample food and medicine supplies, Hauptsturmfuhrer Joseph Kramer, a former commander at Auschwitz, made no effort to help with the problems of overcrowding, insufficient rations, and the spread of contagious diseases. When people died, German soldiers didn�t do anything to the dead bodies. When it was liberated in 1945, over 13,000 unburied corpses were found. The Germans probably treated people, alive and dead, worse here than at any other concentration camp.
There were many different people that came to the camps; many for no reason. People all over Europe were taken to Belsen--Poles, French, Belgians, Dutch, Norwegians, Russians, Italians, Czechs, and Serbs. Many of these people had been kidnapped off the streets so that they could work in Germany as slave laborers. They were either prisoners of war or they were somehow related to the resistance and their countries. Many were Jews but there were also many other people who may not have been related to the war in any way. With all the people constantly being brought in there was a lot of confusion between family members. Some could never find each other because of all the people there were. Families at Belsen needed to stick together more than ever before.
Because life in Belsen was harsh, German soldiers had no respect for the people in it, and there were people coming in from all over Europe for no reason, it may have been the worst concentration camp to live in. Although it is not as famous as Auschwitz or Treblinka, it stands alone as one of the most vicious and vile concentration camps. Many people could not survive in Belsen. There were very few that made it out alive. People should remember Belsen, to prevent further situations like this to happen.