German camp memorial offers Russian tour to mark 'forgotten victims'

Yahoo

8 hours ago

A memorial for the Nazi-era concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany is set to offer a guided tour in Russian on Sunday to commemorate the site's "forgotten victims" from the Soviet Union.
The camp, which was liberated by the British Army in April 1945, is well known as the place where Jewish schoolgirl Anne Frank died during World War II.
However, it also included some 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were forced to work in the camp after July 1941.
With insufficient accommodation available, the men lived in open fields and sought shelter in makeshift huts and caves.
More than 14,000 of them died of cold, hunger and disease in the winter of 1941-42 alone.
To mark the 84th anniversary of Nazi Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union, a 90-minute tour is to be offered in German and Russian, leading from the memorial site to the nearby prisoner of war cemetery.
There are 19,580 people buried in the cemetery, with historian Katja Seybold working on creating a list of the names of those who died.
Almost 13,000 of the names have been identified, the researcher said.
Interviews with surviving prisoners of war can be listened to at the Bergen-Belsen Documentation Centre.
Interest in the fate of the prisoners of war is growing, said Seybold.
Many Ukrainians who have fled to Germany in recent years have also visited the memorial and the cemetery.
The prisoner of war camp closed three months before the site's liberation by the British Army.
According to Seybold, this may explain why the fate of the prisoners of war was left untold for so long.
A total of some 70,000 people lost their lives at Bergen-Belsen.
Around 120,000 men, women and children were interned in the concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, around 52,000 of whom died.