The NATO Training Ground

The Bergen-Belsen Memorial is next to an enormous NATO training base, the Bergen-Hohne Training Area, according to wikipedia it's 70,000 acres big. To visit the Soviet POW Cemetery you must cross their land, and if you stray out of The POW Camp, as I inadvertently did, you'll find yourself on a training ground for tank drivers, judging by the tracks and the man-made obstacles in the roads.

I was at Bergen-Belsen for almost 9 hours, and the sound of gunfire was almost incessant, especially for the first several hours. But they were shooting again as I left around 19:30 hours.

Most of my fellow visitors to Bergen-Belsen when I was there—and this was the case with all four of the Nazi concentration camps I visited within a week—were groups of school or college children, probably between 13 and 18 years of age. But at Belsen I saw a group of soldiers being given a guide tour, soldiers I later found out (by badges sewn to their uniforms) were from the Netherlands.