Compared
to the appalling number of men, women and children killed at the Nazi
extermination camps — places like Sobibor, Chelmno, Treblinka and others
where, cumulatively, millions perished — the death toll at the
Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwest Germany was (a horrible
thing to say!) relatively small. More than a million people were killed
at Auschwitz-Birkenau alone; at Belsen, by most estimates, fewer than
100,000 died — from starvation and disease (typhus, for example), as
well as outright slaughter.
But in the spring of 1945, photographs and eyewitness accounts from
the liberation of camps like Bergen-Belsen afforded the disbelieving
world outside of Europe its first glimpse into the abyss of Nazi
depravity. All these years later, after countless reports, books, oral
histories and documentary films have constructed a terrifyingly clear
picture of the Third Reich’s vast machinery of murder, it’s difficult to
grasp just how shocking these first revelations really were. The most
horrific rumors about what was happening to the Jews and millions of
other “undesirables — Catholics, pacifists, homosexuals, Slavs — in
Nazi-occupied lands paled before the reality revealed by the liberation
of the camps.
Here, on the anniversary of the April 15, 1945, liberation of
Bergen-Belsen by British troops, LIFE.com presents a series of
photographs made at the camp by the great George Rodger (later a
founding Magnum member). In an issue of LIFE published a few weeks
later, in which several of the pictures in this gallery first appeared,
the magazine told its readers of a “barbarism that reaches the low point
of human degradation.”
