# Bergen-Belsen <table class="place-meta"> <tr><td>Location</td><td>Near Bergen, southwest of Celle, Lower Saxony, Germany</td></tr> <tr><td>Region (today)</td><td>Lower Saxony, Germany</td></tr> <tr><td>Coordinates</td><td>52°45′34″N 9°54′27″E</td></tr> </table> ## Overview Bergen-Belsen was a Nazi camp in what is today Lower Saxony, near the village of Bergen southwest of Celle. German military authorities first built it as a prisoner-of-war camp in 1940; from April 1943 the SS took over part of the site and ran it as a concentration and "exchange" camp, initially holding Jewish hostages meant to be traded for German nationals abroad. In the war's final months it became a destination for evacuation transports from camps further east, and severe overcrowding, starvation and a typhus epidemic caused catastrophic mortality — Anne Frank and her sister Margot were among those who died there in early 1945. Roughly 20,000 Soviet POWs and some 50,000 other prisoners died at Bergen-Belsen. British forces (11th Armoured Division) liberated the camp on 15 April 1945, finding about 60,000 survivors and 13,000 unburied dead; thousands more died in the weeks after liberation. The site is now a memorial and documentation centre. <small>Sources: Wikipedia — Bergen-Belsen concentration camp; USHMM Holocaust Encyclopedia — Bergen-Belsen; Imperial War Museum — The Liberation of Bergen-Belsen; Bergen-Belsen Memorial.</small> ## People with events here | Person | Event | | --- | --- | | [[Moshe David Hollander (b.1917)]] | Died 09/1944 | | [[Dov Ber Hersh Pearl (b.1927)]] | Died 1945 | | [[Rosa Stahl (b.1901)]] | Died 1945 | | [[Lajos Katz (b.1889)]] | Died 01/1945 | | [[Rachel Szerman (b.1901)]] | Died 05/15/1945 | | [[Esther Steinberg (b.1924)]] | Died | | [[Rivka Steinberg (b.1926)]] | Died |