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VE Day 2025: Richard visits Belsen concentration camp to mark 80th anniversary of the liberation

Richard reflects on his visit to Belsen, which formed part of the Association of Ex-Jewish Servicemen and Women's Commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the liberation.

Today marks 80 years since the end of the Second World War.

At 3pm on 8 May 1945, an announcement signalled the end of fighting in Europe and the victory of Allies over Nazi Germany and its associated Axis Powers.

Here, our Chief Executive Richard reflects on his recent visit to Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, as part of AJEX’s Commemoration of the 80th Anniversary of the Liberation.

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“What’s in a name? Belsen, perhaps more correctly Bergen-Belsen is a district of the town of Bergen in northern Germany, just as is Bergen-Hohne (where two kilometres up the road there is a barracks); but Belsen means far more than this.

Hidden in endless pine woods, the British Army, advancing towards the end of the Second World War, were confronted with, for many of them, the worst scene of the entire six years of warfare.

On 15^th April 1945, they entered a camp that showed the true horror of both the human capacity for evil and the true intents of the Nazi regime. And while we can heal and reduce physical scars, the mental scars of such a place rarely disappear completely.

As we drove in a comfortable coach with a packed lunch a week ago, as part of the Association of Ex-Jewish Servicemen and Women (AJEX) Commemoration of the 80^th anniversary of the liberation, I think few were prepared for what we were to see.

This was not an extermination or death camp like Auschwitz, designed specifically to extinguish life as efficiently as possible, but a holding camp, where political prisoners, Roma, Sinti and mostly Jews, prisoners of war, and those who could be bargained in prisoner exchanges, were imprisoned.

There were no towers or huts left, no chimneys or gas chambers ever. Instead, today there is a huge open space among the trees, where nothing apart from short grass grows, and very noticeably there is no life, no birdsong, nothing except huge mounds and the occasional memorial.

Under those mounds was what we had come to commemorate. By early 1944 the camp had become the last resort of the Nazi concentration camp system, with thousands being force-marched across Europe from Poland and elsewhere, in what became known as death marches.

The camp rapidly overflowed with people arriving, and yet the food, sanitation and health systems were not designed to cope, nor were the Nazis concerned.

The real terror of Belsen is that perhaps as many as 70,000 people (men, women and children) died there, from callous neglect and indifference to suffering, from slow, cruel, cold-blooded starvation. The camp’s prisoners just wasted away, fed on a couple of hundred grams a day.

It was described as worse than Auschwitz as there was nothing to do (except endless roll calls that lasted hours and hours, outside in the freezing winter) and nothing there except disease, starvation and dying, piece by piece, day by day, to the complete lack of any care, feeling or concern of the Guards, who were as brutal as ever.

The liberators were faced with thousands of terribly thin, skin and bone living dead, skeletons shuffling across the ground, aimlessly, collapsing, waiting for death. And emaciated dead bodies, everywhere, left where they had died.

Those (mostly Jewish) 70,000 are buried under the mounds, thousands at a time. And as many as 14,000 died after liberation, from appalling disease and unable to digest the rations that were given to them initially.

I was stationed in Hohne at the turn of the century. My mother, Jewish, refused to visit. My father, who vividly remembered the headlines in the papers as a schoolboy in 1945, visited the camp, and was in tears the whole day. My mother-in-law, one of the first to be there in April 1945, never spoke of it.

I defy anyone who has been to a concentration camp not to be moved by the impact of the callous disregard for human life, cruelty, death and ability of people to be so de-humanised.

This is the true lesson of history that must not be forgotten.”

Written – and all photos taken – by Lieutenant General (Ret.) Richard Nugee, Chief Executive of the Scar Free Foundation.

To read more about the work we do with Veterans, Armed Forces Personnel, and those affected by conflict and terrorism, head to our News area and research pages.

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