Bergen-Belsen

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Bergen-Belsen:   One of the main Concentration Camps.
How would you like to be stuck in a room with one-hundred or more people and no bedding or ventilation?   Bergen-Belsen was one of the main main death camps that killed around five-hundred people a day. Most people died of starvation, overwork, disease, and brutality; some sadly died of sadistic medical experiments.
The living conditions at Bergen-Belsen were terrible.   They placed over one-hundred people in one room, about as big as a normal classroom.   They got very little food a week, barely one pair of clothes, if they had any and no beds.   They had to sleep on the floor or in crowded bunks, which had little to no cushion.   These conditions made them very vulnerable to sickness.
Bergen-Belsen was a complex camp made up of multiple camps during its existence.   The camp by the end of liberation had three main camps that held different people, and broke down further into more smaller camps.   The three main camps were the:   Prisoners of War, Residence, and Prisoners’ camp.   Over time Bergen-Belsen held:   Jews, P.O.W., Political prisoners, Gypsies, Criminals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and homosexuals.
The Prisoners of war camp functioned the whole time during the first establishment of Bergen-Belsen and was the command of Bergen-Belsen.   The residences’ camp broke down into four sub-camps:   Special, Neutrals, Star, and Hungarian Camp.   The prisoners’ camp, was in operation from April 1943 until April 1945.   The Prisoners’ camp consisted of the initial “Prisoner’s camp”, Recuperation, Tent, small and large Women’s camp.   With all the camps separated Bergen-Belsen ran smoothly, until it got over crowded within a few months.

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Josef Kramer was a German commander at Bergen-Belsen.   He was known as the “Beast of Belsen.”   Just a few weeks before the war was over thousands of new prisoners arrived causing mass starvation and disease.   To resolve this problem, Kramer decided it would be best to add beatings...