Three female staff from Belsen Concentration Camp. Bergen-Belsen was started as late as April 1943 in Lower Saxony near the city of Celle as a transit centre. It was turned into a concentration camp by its second commandant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, and was used to house those prisoners who had become too weak to work as forced labour in German factories. It was liberated by the British army on April 15th, 1945. The British soldiers found 10,000 unburied corpses and 40,000 sick and dying prisoners of whom a staggering 28,000 subsequently died after liberation. As a result of these atrocities, 45 former members of staff from Bergen-Belsen, including some inmates who had taken part in acts of brutality against other prisoners, were charged with either being responsible for the murder of Allied nationals or the suffering of those in Bergen-Belsen in Germany (first count) or Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland, (second count). Some defendants were charged with ...