Bergen Belsen Liberation
On 14th April 1945 British troops entered a German concentration camp for the first time and horrified the world with reports of the conditions inside. Inside the camp at Bergen Belsen, near Hanover, the soldiers found piles of dead and rotting bodies and thousands of prisoners suffering from typhoid, typhus, tuberculosis and starvation. Despite a major medical effort, nearly 30,000 of the camp survivors died after the liberation.

The camp was created two years earlier by the Nazis as a transit camp and is remembered now, along with Auschwitz and Dachau, as prime examples of Nazi barbarism. In this photo, which was taken after the liberation, starving internees wait at the cook house gate for their rations of potato soup.

For more about Germany in the Second World War, see 20th Century: Hitler and the Third Reich.