British troops enter Bergen-Belsen and find 13,000 unburied corpses
The first camp the Western Allies liberate shows the world what photographs alone had not proven
Quick facts
- Bergen-Belsen liberated
- 15 April 1945, by British forces
- Prisoners found alive
- About 55,000, many gravely ill
- Deaths after liberation
- More than 13,000
- Deaths in camp before liberation
- About 37,000 (May 1943-April 1945)
- Dachau liberated
- 29 April 1945, by US forces; about 30,000 survivors found
What happened
On 15 April 1945, British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen, a camp in northern Germany that by that point held around 55,000 prisoners, most of them gravely ill after a typhus epidemic had torn through the overcrowded camp in its final months. Thousands of unburied corpses lay across the camp grounds when British troops arrived; camp sanitation had collapsed entirely. More than 13,000 former prisoners died after liberation, too weakened by starvation and disease to recover even with British medical care, beyond the roughly 37,000 who had died in the camp between May 1943 and the day of liberation. British forces later burned the camp to the ground to halt the spread of typhus. Two weeks later, on 29 April 1945, US forces liberated Dachau, the first concentration camp the Nazis had built back in 1933, finding about 30,000 surviving prisoners there.
Why it matters
Bergen-Belsen and Dachau were among the first camps the Western Allies encountered directly, and BBC and newsreel footage shot at Bergen-Belsen in the days after liberation became some of the most widely seen documentary evidence of the Holocaust, making the scale of Nazi atrocity impossible to dismiss as rumor or propaganda in a way that written reports alone had not achieved.
How we know
British Army medical officers and war correspondents documented conditions at Bergen-Belsen within days of liberation, and their photographs, film, and written reports, now held by the US Holocaust Memorial Museum and Imperial War Museums, form the primary evidentiary record.
Sources
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Bergen-Belsen · Primary source (author-declared)encyclopedia.ushmm.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
- Holocaust Encyclopedia, US Holocaust Memorial Museum. Liberation of Nazi Camps · Primary source (author-declared)encyclopedia.ushmm.org · Cited as a "primary" source (no stronger domain match). · Link is live and its text matches the event's key terms (Jul 2026)
See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.
Part of a timelineWorld War II101 events · From a staged skirmish at a bridge outside Beijing to a charter signed in San Francisco, the deadliest conflict in history, every event sourced.View all →