Belsen: The Untold Story

A one-hour documentary telling the untold story of the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where over 50,000 Jewish prisoners were killed during WWII.

SYNOPSIS

Belsen: The Untold Story tells the story of the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp where over 50,000 people, mostly Jews, died in the last phase of World War II.

As the Allied troops advanced into Germany through the winter of 1944, thousands of Jewish prisoners were evacuated from camps near the Eastern front, mostly through brutal forced marches. Bergen-Belsen’s population increased 8-fold to nearly 60,000. But unlike the notorious extermination or death camps such as Auschwitz or Treblinka, Belsen wasn’t designed as a place of killing. There were no gas chambers; instead, the prisoners were slaughtered by systematic neglect. Many starved to death, others succumbed to typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid fever or dysentery – diseases which ravaged the camp fostered by the lack of clean drinking water and minimal sanitation.

All that remains of Belsen today is a peaceful, grassy meadow, but its legacy lives on through the recollections of those who survived it. Featuring powerful new interviews with some of the last remaining survivors of the Holocaust and dramatic reconstructions, combined with archive of the British liberation, these oral histories ensure that their story is not forgotten.