After the Second World War, a series of trials were held to bring the perpetrators of wartime crimes to justice. The most high-profile took place in Nuremberg, where remaining members of Hitler's inner circle faced judges and some received death sentences.
But other war crimes trials focused on specific camps. Among them were the Belsen trials, which aimed to bring the SS guards and staff involved in atrocities at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp to account.
The liberation of Belsen was captured on camera, along with the immense suffering inflicted by the guards. What shocked many was that a large number of the guards and staff were young women.
Bergen-Belsen began as a camp for Allied prisoners of war. It was established in 1940 inside Germany and was used exclusively for prisoners of war until 1943.
The SS then took over part of the camp and eventually turned it into a concentration camp. The complex was made up of several centres with three main sections: the prisoner of war camp, the resident camp, and the prisoner camp.
Over the course of the war, the complex held Jews, political prisoners, and other groups targeted for persecution by the Nazis. The SS divided Belsen into subsections for different groups, including a Hungarian camp, a special camp for Polish prisoners, and a star camp for Dutch Jews.
Between 1943 and 1944, thousands of prisoners were transported to Belsen. Inmates were forced to work in a shoe commando, recovering pieces of leather from shoes for recycling.
Bergen-Belsen also became a recovery camp, where sick prisoners arrived from other places. The idea was that they would recover, but the majority were put to work and died of disease, starvation, and poor medical care.
In August 1944, a women's camp was established at Belsen. Large numbers of women were brought there, though most stayed only a short time before being moved elsewhere for slave labour.
It is famously known as the place where Margot and Anne Frank were transported, and where both died inside the barbed wire fences of Belsen. Much of the suffering inside the camp was caused by huge overcrowding as the Germans lost territory during the war.
By late 1944, Joseph Kramer, known as the Beast of Belsen, was in charge. Under his leadership, Belsen swelled enormously in size.
Around 85,000 people were transported to Bergen-Belsen, and within a year the number of prisoners had risen tenfold. The overcrowding caused catastrophic effects.
There was nowhere near enough food, and malnutrition caused thousands to starve. Disease swept through Belsen, with huge outbreaks of tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery causing more deaths.
Belsen was only meant to house ten thousand prisoners, but the huge number of transported prisoners caused severe problems. It has been estimated that over 120,000 prisoners passed through Belsen during the time it operated.
Treatment varied depending on the section of the camp. Exchange prisoners were often treated better than others.
There were no gas chambers at Belsen, but the vast majority of prisoners died from the conditions inside, caused by the huge overcrowding. When the British and Canadians liberated Belsen, the scale of the problem was brought to the world's knowledge.
On 11 April 1945, Himmler had agreed to hand over the camp without a fight, and the SS guards ordered prisoners to bury some of the dead to try to hide the crimes. A few days later, the British set up a neutral zone surrounding Belsen.
What surprised the British was that so many of the guards and staff, including Joseph Kramer, were still inside the camp. Kramer claimed they were there to uphold order.
When the British and Canadians entered Bergen-Belsen, what they saw was truly horrific. They found over 13,000 unburied bodies and sixty thousand prisoners in a terrible state, many dying of starvation and disease.
The majority of prisoners had simply been abandoned, given no food and water for days, and 500 were dying each day from disease. The scenes were reported on the BBC.
It was said that over an acre of ground lay dead and dying people, and you could not see which was which. The living lay with their heads across the corpses, while emaciated, aimless people moved around them with nothing to do and no hope of life.
Babies had been born there, tiny things that could not live. A mother driven mad screamed at a British soldier to give her milk for her child and thrust a tiny bundle into his arms, then ran off crying terribly. He opened the bundle and found the baby had been dead for days.
The British began to provide care and support for the prisoners. After the liberation, revenge killings did take place, and even SS guards shot and killed some prisoners who tried to get food from the storehouses.
Over the next few days, prisoners were de-loused and survivors were moved to a different camp. The British forced many of the SS staff based at the camp to bury the bodies in mass graves.
The camp was then burned to the ground by flame tanks due to the epidemic of typhus. Huge efforts were made to help the survivors.
But one thing remained on the minds of those thinking about Belsen: who on earth could carry out the atrocities committed at the camp, and who could inflict such suffering on other people. Over the time it was operating, almost 500 people worked at Belsen.
From 17 September 1945 to 17 November 1945, 45 SS guards and former workers were brought to justice in the Belsen trials. What shocked many people around the world was that many of these were young women, whose names have gone down in history with the immense cruelty and sadism of the Holocaust.
The trial took 54 court days and comprised much of the British army footage taken as Belsen was liberated. On trial were those found at the camp, and those such as Joseph Kramer who were involved in the leadership of the camp. Other staff, such as doctors and cooks, also found themselves on trial.
Some of the women brought to trial have gone down in infamy for their notoriously sadistic treatment of prisoners at Belsen and at other concentration camps such as Ravensbrück and Auschwitz. Those on trial in the Belsen trial included Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Johanna Bormann, Hertha Bothe, Herta Ehlert, Ilse Förster, Irene Haschke, Gertrude Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrude Feist, Frieda Walter, and Hilde Lobauer, along with other women who were acquitted.
Some of these women were notoriously evil. Irma Grese became known as the Beautiful Beast, or the Hyena of Auschwitz. She was only 22 when she faced court and was the youngest person to die under British law in the 20th century.
Grese was a strange character, and her father even threw her out of his home out of disgust that she had become a concentration camp guard. She served as a guard at different camps and was known for taking part in selections at Auschwitz, picking women and children to be sent to their deaths in the gas chambers, virtually playing god with other people's lives.
She was also known for murdering prisoners with her own hands and weapons, and for setting dogs onto prisoners, encouraging them to rip the prisoners apart. Elisabeth Volkenrath was just a young girl when she faced the judges.
She too worked as an overseer inside Auschwitz and was noted for selecting prisoners to go to the gas chambers. Volkenrath was well thought of inside the Auschwitz command and oversaw all of the camp sections for female prisoners, virtually being the head of the women's prison.
She was also known for being a prolific murderer, often beating prisoners unconscious with a truncheon. She once pushed an elderly prisoner down some stairs to her death and was known for shooting prisoners at will.
Johanna Bormann was also known as the woman with the dogs. She was older than Grese and Volkenrath and worked in a number of different camps.
She was selected to work inside Auschwitz and abused prisoners terribly. She was known for setting her dogs onto prisoners and murdering them, and she also took part in selections.
These three women in particular were sentenced to death alongside a number of men following the Belsen trials. They were found guilty of crimes against humanity for inflicting such suffering on prisoners of Bergen-Belsen and also Auschwitz and other camps where they worked.
Hertha Bothe, Herta Ehlert, Ilse Förster, Irene Haschke, Gertrude Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrude Feist, Frieda Walter, and Hilde Lobauer were all sentenced to various prison sentences. They had been found guilty of only one offence, while the condemned were found guilty of more than one.
The executions from the Belsen trials were carried out on 13 December 1945 by hanging. The executioner was Albert Pierrepoint, an experienced executioner who used the long drop method.
Pierrepoint would meet the condemned prior to execution to work out their height, weight, and the drop needed to snap their necks. He was brought to Hameln prison to carry out the executions and was seen as reliable and trusted, expected to complete the job effectively and efficiently.
When he met Irma Grese, he wrote in his biography that at last they finished noting the details of the men, and O'Neill ordered, "Bring out Irma Grese." She walked out of her cell and came towards them laughing.
Pierrepoint wrote that she seemed as bony a girl as anyone could ever meet. O'Neill questioned her, but when they asked her age she paused and smiled.
Pierrepoint found that they were both smiling with her, as if they realized the conventional embarrassment of a woman revealing her age. Eventually she said 21, which they knew to be correct.
O'Neill asked her to step on the scales, and she said "schnell," the German for quick. In British prisons, warders and medical staff would have been responsible for weighing and measuring the condemned prior to execution, but on this occasion Albert Pierrepoint and O'Neill did it.
Irma was five feet five and a quarter inches tall and weighed 150 pounds, and she was given a drop of seven feet four inches. Grese's execution was also described by Pierrepoint.
It was chosen that she would be the first of the condemned to die due to her age, though there is some debate as to whether she and Volkenrath were executed first. The executions of the women took place at 9:34 a.m., 10:04 a.m., and 10:38 a.m.
Pierrepoint wrote of Grese's execution that the following morning they climbed the stairs to the cells where the condemned were awaiting. The German officer at the door flung it open, and they filed past a row of faces and into the execution chamber.
The officers stood at attention, and Brigadier Paton Walsh stood with his wristwatch raised. He gave the signal, and a sigh of released breath was audible in the chamber.
Pierrepoint walked into the corridor. Irma Grese's eye called the German guards, who quickly closed all of the grills on all 12 of the inspection holes and opened one door.
Irma Grese stepped out. The cell was far too small for Pierrepoint to go inside, and he had to pinion her in the corridor.
"Follow me," he said in English, and O'Neill repeated the order in German. At 9:34 a.m. she walked into the execution chamber, gazed for a moment at the officials standing round it, then walked on to the centre of the trap where Pierrepoint had made a chalk mark.
She stood on the mark very firmly, and as he placed a white cap over her head she said in her voice, "schnell." The drop crashed down, and the doctor followed Pierrepoint into the pit and pronounced her dead. After 20 minutes her body was taken down and placed in a coffin ready for burial.
Elisabeth Volkenrath, following her death sentence, continued to deny her involvement in the Holocaust. She stated that she did not know where the prisoners she selected were going and claimed to have never heard of the gas chambers.
It was Pierrepoint who would hear her final words. At around 10:04 a.m., in the same manner as Grese, she was brought from her cell, her identity confirmed, and then she was handed over to Pierrepoint for her execution.
With ruthless efficiency he performed her execution, the drop snapping her neck. She was only 26 when she was executed, and when she first conducted her horrific crimes she was even younger.
Johanna Bormann is the outlier of the three women executed following the Belsen trials. She was much older than Grese and Volkenrath, but the two displayed sadistic tendencies shown by the staff who worked inside the concentration camps.
When he met her, Pierrepoint stated that she limped down the corridor looking old and haggard. She was 52, standing only a little over five feet, and she was trembling as she was put on the scale.
In German she said, "I have my feelings." Like the two women who went before her, Bormann was executed with efficiency by Pierrepoint, who had already meticulously calculated the drop needed, which was eight feet eight inches.
Her execution was performed at 10:38 a.m. and was carried out very swiftly. She was the final woman executed following the Belsen trials.
The men were then fetched from their cells to face their sentence, and Pierrepoint performed 11 executions on 13 December 1945 inside Hameln prison on the gallows. The execution of the female guards of Belsen showed the world how evil these three women in particular were.
The Belsen trials brought to the world's attention how terrible humans can be to one another, with the suffering of those inside the camp shown in front of the world's media. The suffering of those responsible for the horrific conditions at Belsen was short-lived and was no match for what they inflicted on innocent people.
Belsen was the place where Anne Frank and tens of thousands of other people died because of the regime that sought to exterminate so many people from the face of the earth. The executions of Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, and Johanna Bormann were justified, but for so much suffering only a few were executed.
Much interest fell on those who were simply sentenced to time in prison, and there was much debate as to whether more people could have been sentenced to death for the crimes of Bergen-Belsen.