On this day in 1945, the British Army liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp.Bergen-Belsen was established in 1940 as a prisoner-of-war camp and later evolved into a concentration camp. By 1943, Nazis were using this location as a place where Jews were detained and considered “leverage” in exchange for Germans that had been interned in Allied countries. Towards the end of the War, the British military had come to an agreement with retreating Germans on April 12, 1945, that they would liberate Bergen-Belsen. The 11th Armored Division from Britain had already arrived in Normandy the year prior, working its way across Europe through the Netherlands and then into Germany nine months later, battling against Germans along the way. Under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Richard Taylor, British forces arrived on April 15, 1945, in Bergen-Belsen. The liberators met around 60,000 people (primarily Jews) who were still alive but most of them were extremely ill.Sanitation and deterioration in the packed camp led to conditions such as typhoid, dysentery, and tuberculosis. Germans had neglected this camp as the war continued; they would bring more Jews from death camps to Bergen-Belsen, assuming they weren’t killed beforehand, and detained them there instead, where conditions were just as heinous. The British began relief efforts immediately at Bergen-Belsen focusing predominantly on medical care; food and water provisions did not arrive until the next day. Eventually, they would help survivors figure out where to go next for the living occupants at the camp. The British troops also took care of burying over 13,000 dead bodies that were there.Remarks by British officers over the poor condition of the camp, and the sites of the dead and living bodies, made international headlines, bringing attention to the horrors of what had happened during the Holocaust. Despite the liberation by the British, an estimated 14,000 more Jews continued to die at Bergen-Belsen in the month following due to their terrible health. British troops continued to clean up Bergen-Belsen over the course of the spring. They burned many of the buildings down to the ground that were already in depletion in order to make room for more burial zones. Liberation troops also erected signs outside of the concentration camp site so that the public could see quantifiably the horrors of what had happened there. When these totals were released, many in Britain did not believe what had happened at first.