Queen to visit Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
THE Queen is to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany where 50,000 Jews and 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war perished under the Nazis.
The Queen is set to visit the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp
Seventy years after British troops liberated the camp, where the teenage diarist Anne Frank died, the 89-year-old monarch and Prince Philip, 93, will lay a wreath at a memorial to the victims.
Their trip to the camp near the town of Celle in Lower Saxony, northern Germany, will come on the final day of a four-day State Visit to Germany next month.
The Queen and Philip will visit from June 23 to 26, spending most of their time in Berlin but also going to Frankfurt for a day on June 25 to mark the birth of German parliamentary democracy in the city and meet the public in the central square.
the 89-year-old monarch and Prince Philip, 93, will lay a wreath at a memorial to the victims
In Berlin, the Queen will lay a wreath at Germany¹s central memorial for the victims of war and dictatorship after taking a boat along the River Spree to the Chancellery to meet Chancellor Angela Merkel.
She and Philip will also go on a royal walkabout at Pariser Platz and view the nearby Brandenburg Gate on their last day before flying to Bergen-Belsen, which British troops liberated on April 15, 1945. They found thousands of bodies lying unburied around the camp and some 60,000 starving inmates.
Many were suffering from typhus and dysentery and were too weak to eat when the troops tried to give them their rations. Some 14,000 died after liberation.
Major Dick Williams, then a staff captain in the Supplies and Transport branch of the British Army¹s VIII Corps Headquarters, was one of the first British soldiers to reach the camp and described seeing inmates strewn everywhere.
You didn¹t know whether they were living or dead. Most of them were dead,² he said later. ³Some were trying to walk, some were stumbling, some on hands and knees.
But in the lagers, the barbed wire around the huts, you could see that the doors were open. The stench coming out of them was fearsome. They were lying in the doorways tried to get down the stairs and fallen and just died on the spot.²