Tuesday, 26 June 2012

The House of Silence





The House of Silence on the left and the Obelisk on the right

The Visitor Centre


The Bergen-Belsen Exhibition, Documentation Centre





  
  






Inside looking out


From the other-way


This was in the prayer room within the Visitor Centre




Friday, 22 June 2012

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.




The Memorial Entrance Gate


The three photos below taken from the indicated position






 Sign by the entrance to the memorial's carpark.



The Mass Graves


here for enlarged version

  




The SS Administration










The POW Camp