On April 15, 1945, a British soldier pushed open a gate in northern Germany and stepped into a place that should not have existed in the modern world. What he found there would haunt him for the rest of his life. Thirteen thousand corpses were left to rot in the open air. Sixty thousand human skeletons were too weak to bury them.
This was the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. The most disturbing part of the story is not the camp itself, but the young women who ran it with smiles while people died at their feet.
Bergen-Belsen did not begin as an extermination camp. It opened in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war facility for captured Allied soldiers, operated according to the rules of war. That changed in 1943 when the SS took over part of the site and began transforming it into something entirely different.
By the time the transformation was complete, Belsen contained three distinct areas: a POW compound, a so-called residence camp, and a prisoner camp that became one of the deadliest places on Earth. Inside, the SS divided prisoners by nationality and threat level. There was a camp for Hungarians, a section for Polish Jews, and a star camp for Dutch Jews.
Thousands arrived between 1943 and 1944. Many were forced into brutal labor such as the so-called shoe battalion, where prisoners stripped leather from piles of discarded shoes for recycling in Germany. Belsen was also used as a dumping ground for sick prisoners transferred from other camps under the pretense that they would recover. Instead, most died from hard labor, starvation, or were left to die from disease without real medical care.
In August 1944, the SS opened a women’s camp at Belsen. It became a transit point before longer journeys to forced labor elsewhere. This was the same camp where teenage sisters Margot and Anne Frank were sent. Both girls died there, weeks apart, just months before liberation. Their deaths were not an isolated tragedy. They were symptoms of a system collapsing toward total catastrophe.
By late 1944, a man nicknamed the Beast of Belsen took command. His name was Josef Kramer. Under his leadership, the camp population exploded. Around 85,000 people were pushed through the gates of Belsen, and within one year the number of prisoners increased tenfold. A facility designed for 10,000 people became suddenly overcrowded far beyond that. The consequences were immediate and devastating.
Food ran out first. Malnutrition swept through the barracks, and thousands starved to death where they sat. Then came disease. Typhus, typhoid, and dysentery spread unchecked among a population with no clean water, no sanitation, and no remaining strength to fight infection. Historians estimate that more than 120,000 prisoners passed through Belsen during its operation.
Unlike Auschwitz, there were no gas chambers here. Belsen did not need them. Starvation, filth, and deliberate neglect were the killing tools. Not every prisoner faced the exact same treatment. Some, such as exchange prisoners held for potential swaps, received slightly better conditions. But for the vast majority, Belsen by early 1945 had become a slow-moving slaughterhouse hiding behind barbed wire, and the outside world had no idea how bad conditions were.
What the British found shattered even the most battle-hardened soldiers. On April 11, 1945, with Allied forces approaching, Heinrich Himmler agreed to surrender Belsen without a fight. Before the surrender, SS guards forced remaining prisoners to bury corpses in a hasty attempt to erase evidence of what happened there. It did not work.
When British and Canadian troops entered days later, they discovered a scene beyond description. Thirteen thousand unburied corpses lay scattered around the camp. Sixty thousand survivors were so severely starved that about 500 people were dying daily from disease alone. Most had gone days without food or water and had been left to their fate as the war collapsed around them.
BBC correspondent Richard Dimbleby was among the first journalists through those gates. What he recorded was so horrific that BBC officials initially refused to broadcast it. They assumed no place on Earth could look the way he described. Dimbleby had to threaten resignation before his report finally reached the public four days later.
In the report, he described a mother who had lost her mind, screaming at a British soldier and demanding milk to feed her baby. The infant had already been dead for days. He ended his report with one devastating sentence. It was the worst day of his life.
British forces moved quickly to save who they could, but chaos followed liberation as well. In the days after, some starving prisoners were shot by SS guards while trying to reach food stores. Revenge killings broke out among survivors and captors alike. Eventually, British forces forced surviving SS staff to bury the dead in mass graves with their own hands. Then, to prevent the spread of typhus, they burned the entire camp to the ground using flame-throwing tanks.
Bergen-Belsen as a physical place ceased to exist within weeks of its liberation. The question no one could answer was simple. Who could do this?
Nearly 500 people worked at Belsen during its operation. The world wanted to know who they were, and more importantly, how ordinary people became instruments of mass suffering. Between September 17 and November 17, 1945, 45 former SS guards and camp staff were tried in the city of Lüneburg in what became known as the Belsen Trial, the first major war crimes court held on German soil.
What shocked observers worldwide was not just the scale of the crimes. It was the identity of many of the accused. Young women, some barely past their teenage years, had chosen to inflict deliberate cruelty on helpless people. Standing in the dock were Irma Grese, Elisabeth Volkenrath, Johanna Bormann, Herta Bothe, Herta Ehlert, Ilse Förster, Irene Haschke, Gertrud Sauer, Anna Hempel, Gertrud Fiest, Frieda Walter, and Hildegard Lechenich, alongside camp commandant Josef Kramer and other male staff, including doctors and cooks who had turned a blind eye to systematic murder.
The trial lasted 54 grueling days and relied on survivor testimony and British Army film footage shot during liberation itself. In the end, eight men and three women were sentenced to death. Other women received prison sentences ranging from a few years to more than a decade, depending on the specific charges proven against them.
Irma Grese earned the nickname the Hyena of Auschwitz and later the Beautiful Beast, a terrifying description for a woman in the prime of youth. She was only 21 or 22 years old when she stood trial and became the youngest woman executed under British law in the entire 20th century. Reports indicate her father threw her out of his home in disgust once he learned what she had become.
At Auschwitz, Grese participated in selections, deciding which women and children would be sent directly to the gas chambers. Survivor testimony and court records described her use of direct physical violence against prisoners. Her name was also linked to setting attack dogs on detainees.
Elisabeth Volkenrath was also strikingly young and rose to become one of the highest-ranking female supervisors at Auschwitz before moving to Belsen, where she took charge of the entire women’s section. She too was linked to selections that sent prisoners to their deaths. Court testimony described her beating prisoners with a stick and held her responsible for the death of at least one prisoner through violence.
Johanna Bormann differed from the other two not in cruelty but in age. She was in her fifties when arrested, had worked in multiple camps since 1938, and earned her own grim nickname, the Woman with the Dogs, for her habitual use of a trained German Shepherd as a weapon against prisoners.
The executions were carried out on December 13, 1945, at Hamelin Prison by Britain’s chief executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, a man so methodical that he calculated the height and weight of each condemned prisoner to determine the rope length needed for instant death. Pierrepoint later wrote about meeting Grese the night before. He remembered her walking toward him laughing. A pretty girl, as one could wish to meet. When asked her age, she paused, smiled, and answered, 21. When ordered onto the scale, she snapped back in German, Quick. Hurry up.
Records confirm the executions took place in a strict half-hour sequence the following morning. Volkenrath first at 9:34 a.m., Grese second at 10:03 a.m., and Bormann last at 10:38 a.m. This corrects a small but important detail in popular accounts that often claim Grese went first. Pierrepoint described bringing Grese into the execution chamber, seeing her stand steady on the chalk-marked trapdoor, and hearing her mutter Quick one last time as he placed the hood over her head. Twenty minutes later, the doctor confirmed her death.
Volkenrath denied everything to the end, insisting she did not know where the prisoners she selected were sent and claiming she had never heard of the gas chambers. Bormann, the oldest of the three, arrived trembling and told the guards quietly in German, I have my feelings. Pierrepoint’s team carried out her sentence with the same practiced efficiency. After the three women, 11 men, including camp commandant Josef Kramer, were hanged the same day.
The Belsen Trial did something no court had done before. It put ordinary participants in genocide on public trial, using real cinematic evidence, and forced the world to watch. It established legal precedents still cited today, rejecting I was just following orders as a legitimate defense and introducing the idea that leaders bear responsibility for what happens under their supervision.
But of the nearly 500 people who worked at Belsen, only 11 were executed. Many left with short prison sentences. Some were acquitted entirely. For a camp through which approximately 120,000 people passed, where disease, starvation, and cruelty killed tens of thousands, that number leaves an unsettling question hanging over the entire case. Was justice truly served, or had it barely begun?
What is certain is this. Bergen-Belsen proved that atrocities do not require monsters in the abstract sense. They require ordinary people willing to look away, or worse, willing to participate. Anne Frank died behind that fence. Tens of thousands of others died with her, unremembered by history. The three women hanged at Hamelin were convicted and punished. But for the scale of suffering at Belsen, the account the world delivered was, in the view of many historians, only a fraction of what was owed.