In April 1943 the Nazis created Bergen-Belsen in Lower Saxony near the city of Celle as a transit center - Bergen-Belsen was never officially given formal concentration camp status. But the second commandant, SS-Hauptsturmführer Josef Kramer, nicknamed the Beast of Belsen, completed the transformation of Bergen-Belsen into a regular concentration camp. Josef Kramer's most recent assignment had been at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

By 1945 thousands of prisoners who had become too weak to work were shipped there, to die off slowly by starvation and typhoid. In the one month of March, more than 18,000 succumbed. Hitlers most famous victim died in Bergen-Belsen a few weeks before the camp was liberated by the British army on April 15, 1945.

However, it was unable to rescue the inmates. On that liberation day the British found 10,000 unburied corpses and 40,000 sick and dying prisoners. Among the living inmates, 28,000 died after the liberation. The inmates were abandoned in Bergen-Belsen by the Germans, left behind for death to come.