The Queen visits Belsen concentration camp and speaks of 'horrific' atrocities

 
The Queen and Prince Philip paid a sombre visit to a former concentration camp today

The Queen has spoken of the “horrific” atrocities committed at Bergen-Belsen as she met its survivors and their British liberators on her first ever visit to the site of a Nazi concentration camp.

Accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen laid a wreath at a memorial to the 70,000 Jews, Russians and other prisoners who died at the place where the Nazis committed “the ultimate blasphemy”.

The cheers and applause that have accompanied the Queen every step of the way during her four-day State visit to Germany were replaced by silence at a patch of land where evil once settled.

She and the Duke had told their aides they wanted to spend time alone contemplating what happened here, and at one point in the half-hour visit they walked together beside one of the grass mounds covering mass graves which hold the remains of up to 5,000 people each.

On each is a stone marker giving the number of nameless victims buried there: “Here lie 2,500 dead…Here Lie 800… Here Lie 1,000,” with the date, April 1945.

Nothing now remains of the huts and buildings where prisoners starved to death or died from disease; in their place is a knee-length grass meadow and number of simple memorials to the dead.

After flying 200 miles west from Berlin, the Queen and the Duke were greeted at the camp by Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Bergen-Belsen Memorial, who met them beside the Jewish Memorial.

Thirty thousand of the 70,000 victims were Jews, and the memorial promises “Israel and the world” will remember them. “Earth conceal not the blood shed on thee!”

Next to the memorial is a simple gravestone placed there in memory of Anne Frank, the teenage diarist who, with her her sister Margot, died at Bergen-Belsen in 1945. In common with gravestones put up by individual families, it does not mark the precise location of her burial place; like every other victim of Bergen-Belsen, her body lies among the jumbled remains which were bulldozed into the giant pits by the thousand.

The Queen and the Duke walked over to the gravestone, talking to Mr Wagner about what had once happened on the ground under their feet.

Mr Wagner said: “The Queen was asking about the Romany gypsies who were here, especially the children, and I was telling her that there were several quite different groups of people here.

“She was interested in why the site looks as it does today, and 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.”

Then came the Queen and the Duke’s solitary walk together, accompanied only by the sound of birdsong from the forest that surrounds the site, and an unaccompanied visit to the House of Silence, where visitors can sit under a glass roof and contemplate the human consequences of tyranny.

On a rough-hewn granite slab at the point of the triangular building, visitors had placed stones with messages written on them, in the Jewish tradition, as well as messages on paper.

“May you find peace,” said one note.

Another said: “If I could live my life again I would find you sooner.”

The largest memorial at Belsen is the Inscription Wall and obelisk, built to commemorate every victim, from every country. It has messages in stone from many of the languages spoken by the victims, including, in English, “To the Memory of all those who died in this place.” It was next to this message that the Queen and the Duke laid a wreath on behalf of the British people.

The Queen, wearing a grey cashmere coat with metallic trim and a grey hat with steel blue trim, both by Angela Kelly, then met a group of prominent Jewish people, including Britain’s Chief Rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis.

The second group she met included survivors and liberators of Belsen.

Captain Eric “Winkle” Brown, 96, entered the camp on the day it was liberated, April 15, 1945, and the Queen asked him what sort of scene greeted him.

“I told her this was just a field of corpses,” he said. The Queen replied: “It must have been horrific really.”

“She was listening very carefully. I would say she was quite affected by the atmosphere here. You can’t avoid it, can you?”

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