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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
However, it also included some 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war who were forced to work in the camp after July 1941.<\/p>\n
With insufficient accommodation available, the men lived in open fields and sought shelter in makeshift huts and caves.<\/p>\n
More than 14,000 of them died of cold, hunger and disease in the winter of 1941-42 alone.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
Almost 13,000 of the names have been identified, the researcher said.<\/p>\n
Interviews with surviving prisoners of war can be listened to at the Bergen-Belsen Documentation Centre.<\/p>\n
Interest in the fate of the prisoners of war is growing, said Seybold.<\/p>\n
Many Ukrainians who have fled to Germany in recent years have also visited the memorial and the cemetery.<\/p>\n
The prisoner of war camp closed three months before the site’s liberation by the British Army.<\/p>\n
According to Seybold, this may explain why the fate of the prisoners of war was left untold for so long.<\/p>\n
A total of some 70,000 people lost their lives at Bergen-Belsen.<\/p>\n
Around 120,000 men, women and children were interned in the concentration camp between 1943 and 1945, around 52,000 of whom died.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A memorial for the Nazi-era concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen in northern Germany is set to offer a guided…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":202832,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5310],"tags":[81808,21574,62631,81809,2000,299,81812,1824,81811,81810,32630,12022],"class_list":{"0":"post-202831","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-bergen-belsen","9":"tag-british-army","10":"tag-camp","11":"tag-concentration-camp","12":"tag-eu","13":"tag-europe","14":"tag-forgotten-victims","15":"tag-germany","16":"tag-nazi-era","17":"tag-northern-germany","18":"tag-prisoners-of-war","19":"tag-soviet-union"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114722034515293364","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202831","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=202831"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202831\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/202832"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=202831"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=202831"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=202831"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}