Between August and November 1944, the SS brought 9,000 women and young girls to this part of the camp. Initially, these were Polish women who had been arrested during the Warsaw Uprising, but later it was mainly Polish and Hungarian Jewesses that were brought here from Auschwitz. Additionally, sick and pregnant female prisoners were transported to Bergen Belsen from other camps. In late 1944 and in 1945, the Bergen-Belsen camp was a place into which so-called ‘evacuation transports’ from other camps were force-marched.
The Germans called Bergen-Belsen a ‘recreation camp’ since it did not have kommandos (working units), and the prisoners reduced their activities to basic everyday activities meant to survive. However, the death rate in the camp was very high.
Therefore, on entering the premises of Bergen-Belsen in 1945, the British troops found piles of dead bodies. There were no crematoria in the camp so, having found so many corpses, the British had to bury them as soon as possible to avoid the outbreak of an epidemic. The bodies were buried in mass graves by means of bulldozers.
From among 120,000 prisoners of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, 38,000 prisoners died (including 15,000 Poles) during the war, while 14,000 died within the period of the next six weeks afterwards. Therefore, the death toll of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp is estimated at 52,000 victims at least. Unfortunately, this number is only hypothetical in character as it is only based on the estimated data.
Just after the liberation, former prisoners themselves began to put up signs and memorials in the form of individual headstones. They organised religious funerals and ceremonies in memory of the murdered. In 1945, by the initiative of Polish and Jewish former prisoners, the first monuments to collectively commemorate the Bergen-Belsen victims were erected. The visible symbol of the Polish victims of the Bergen-Belsen camp was a wooden cross, unveiled and consecrated on 2 November 1945, in the presence of thousands of former prisoners and representatives of the Vatican.
In late September 1945, the British had an appropriate memorial site created around the mass graves. In the summer of 1946, an international commission, represented by, among others, former prisoners, recommended erecting an obelisk and a wall with an inscription. In 1952, the Memorial Site - the Monument in memory of the victims, was opened in Bergen-Belsen. In 1985, right before the 40th anniversary of the liberation of the camp, a new memorial site and a Bergen-Belsen museum were established.
Nowadays, the Bergen-Belsen Memorial is run by the Lower Saxony Memorials Foundation (Stiftung niedersächsische Gedenkstätten). The site is the main and the largest memorial site of the tragic 1939-1945 history and the post-war period of Lower Saxony.
On 22 June 2002, there was unveiled a metal memorial plaque bearing the Polish national emblem and an inscription in three languages: Polish, German and English. The plaque was funded by the Council for the Protection of the Remembrance of Combat and Martyrdom, and the inscription reads as follows: ‘In memory of about 15,000 Polish men, women and children who were martyred in KZ Bergen-Belsen, the ashes of whom rest in this ground.’