This article is from the source 'guardian' and was first published or seen on . It last changed over 40 days ago and won't be checked again for changes.

You can find the current article at its original source at http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jun/26/queen-meets-survivors-and-liberators-of-bergen-belsen-concentration-camp

The article has changed 5 times. There is an RSS feed of changes available.

Version 1 Version 2
Queen meets survivors and liberators of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp Queen meets survivors and liberators of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
(about 1 hour later)
The Queen has spoken of the horrific scenes British forces faced when they liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp as she visited the Holocaust site. The quiet of Bergen-Belsen belies its unquiet past. Even as the Queen arrived, the stillness of the place seemed little disturbed.
At the camp in northern Germany, where 70,000 people died from disease, starvation or brutal mistreatment, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh paid their respects by laying a wreath. This was a “personal and reflective” visit by the UK’s monarch to the former concentration camp, which surrendered its horrors to British liberators in the dying days of the second world war to become a worldwide symbol of Nazi crimes.
With a minimum of protocol, the royal couple quietly toured the site, which was razed and is now a museum and memorial to those who died during the second world war. On the final day of her state visit to Germany, the Queen and Duke of Edinburgh were joined by a small handful of those liberators and survivors to remember, and pay tribute, to the 70,000 who died here.
Among those who perished at the camp were Anne Frank and her sister Margot, who died a few months before British troops walked through the gates and liberated those interned on 15 April 1945. “It must have horrific,” she said to navy pilot Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown, 96, from West Sussex, one of the first British officers to enter its gates on 15 April 1945.
The Queen, who is patron of the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, had not visited a concentration camp before and it is believed she requested the trip, the last event of her four-day state visit to Germany. “Utterly, utterly horrific,” he recalled later, with some 10,000 bodies just “littered around” and survivors “dehumanised”, urinating and defecating where they stood or lay. “They had lost all dignity, they were dying, none of them looked as if they would live,” he added.
Dr Jens-Christian Wagner, head of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, gave the royal couple a guided tour and said the experience of visiting the site had been an emotional one for the Queen. When Germany handed over the camp to the 11th Armoured Division, there were 53,000 inmates, half-starved, typhus-ridden, overcrowded and more dead than alive. Some 35,000 had died in the previous three months alone, and another 13,000 could not be saved. Each step deeper into the camp revealed fresh, unimaginable nightmare.
The Queen also met British survivors and liberators of Belsen, including Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown, 96. She asked him what scene greeted him when he first arrived. Brown said: “I told her this was just a field of corpses”, and he said the Queen replied: “It must have been horrific really.” Images taken then by British liberators revealed the brutality and depravity of Bergen-Belsen – and Nazi genocide – to a shocked world; thousands of naked corpses piled high being bulldozered – for fear of contagion – into mass graves; pitiful survivors, yellow parchment skin stretched tightly over bones. “Polished skeletons”, was how Richard Dimbleby described them in his historic 1945 radio despatch, propping themselves up against windows to see the light before they died, “and they were dying, every hour and every minute”.
He added: “She was listening very carefully. I would say she was quite affected by the atmosphere here. You can’t avoid it, can you?” The Queen and Prince Philip walked briefly alone through the juniper and heather heathland sprinkled with birch which forms the memorial grounds of the former concentration camp, detention camp, prisoner of war camp, and final destination for those from other camps forced on death marches.
They paused to lay a wreath at the memorial obelisk and Inscription Stone to the thousands of Jews, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war and many others who perished here. The UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who accompanied her, told the Queen that Jews around the world appreciated the gesture of her visit.
Large green mounds mark the sites of mass graves, the rest of the camp having been burnt to the ground in an attempt to halt the typhus epidemic.
“You have to have a good imagination because there’s hardly anything here. We see mounds which cover thousands of bones, we see memorials, but apart from that we see beautiful countryside. For me, it shows how beautiful countryside can become a killing field,” Mirvis said.
Within one of these mounds, no one knows which, lie the remains of Anne Frank, whose teenage diaries would be a global bestseller long after her death, and her older sister Margot. Both died of typhus just weeks before liberation. At a simple headstone bearing their names, the Queen stood silently, her head slightly bowed.
Brown, fluent in German, had helped interrogate camp commandant Josef Kramer and his assistant Irma Grese.
This was his fourth return, and on each he is struck by “a clammy feeling” that “almost envelops you”. He said: “I still wake up the odd morning and the stench of Belsen is in my nostrils. God, that smell was fearsome.”
Of the royal visit, he thought “the world was glad to see her here and showing the spirit of reconciliation”.
“She’s come with the object of reconciliation, really, and it’s long overdue in many ways.” It was a message to the young “not to feel too much guilt about it now, it didn’t happen in their generation”.
Belsen survivor Rudi Oppenheimer, 83, from Berlin now living in London, was 12 when he was sent to the camp where his parents, both 42, died of typhus.
As an “exchange Jew” – whom the Germans hoped to barter for German prisoners – he was put on the last train out five days before the camp was surrendered to the British.
“We were filthy,” he recalled. With no sanitation, no water, little food, “we were the filth that Goebbels tried to tell people we were”.
“I pity the British army who had to look after these people,” said Oppenheimer, adding that he was thrilled at the Queen’s visit – seeing it as a tribute to the British army who liberated the camp.
Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, 89, Polish-born now living in Britain, who was transferred to Bergen-Belsen from Auschwitz where she was a cellist with the women’s orchestra, said: “Belsen was complete chaos. People were sent there and sat there and waited until they were dead”.
She was surprised the Queen had not visited before. “It was liberated by the British and it’s logical she would want to see it because of its very strong connection to Britain,” she said.
Bernard Levy, 89, an army corporal, who arrived the day after it was liberated, said: “The Queen asked me how horrible it was to be here but I didn’t want to dwell on the past, I just wanted to talk about the future, and about educating young people about what happened.”
Karen Pollock, chief executive of the Holocaust Education Trust, said: “Her Majesty’s visit is particularly poignant in this anniversary year – 70 years after the liberation of the camp and will mean so much to the survivors and liberators who are still with us”.
This was the Queen’s fifth official visit to Germany but its fondness for her, it seems, is undiminished. Thousands of flag-waving well-wishers turned out to greet her during a four-day visit that palace officials will judge a huge success.
“We love you Ma’am” said the front page of Bild, Germany’s biggest selling newspaper. “The Queen of England and the Queen of Europe,” chirruped another headline, referencing her meeting with the chancellor, Angela Merkel – “two women united by power and thoughtful use of it”.
But this was the Queen’s first ever visit to a former Nazi concentration camp.
It may have been a sombre note on which to end a successful state visit, yet just by her being here – and having been invited to be here – served as a potent symbol of the mutual respect between Germany and the UK that has continued to grow since those darkest of days in Europe’s past.
Christian Wagner, director of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, said the Queen was interested in why the site looked as it does today. “I explained to her that the wooden buildings were burned down after the liberation to stop the spread of disease, and the other buildings were later demolished by the Germans who wanted the camp to disappear.”