Germany (Lonely Planet, 6th Edition) - Andrea Schulte-Peevers [552]
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Getting There & Away
Several trains each hour to Hanover take from 20 minutes (IC; €10.50) to 45 minutes (S-Bahn; €8.40). There are also IC (€19, 40 minutes) and regional (€15.20, 1¼ hours) services to/from Lüneburg.
If you’re driving, take the B3 straight into the centre.
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Getting Around
City buses 2 and 4 run between the Haupt-bahnhof and Schlossplatz, the two main stations. Single tickets are €1.90 and day passes €4.75.
For a taxi call 444 44 or 280 01. Bicycle hire is available at Fahrradhaus Jacaoby ( 254 89; Bahnhofstrasse 27; bicycle per day €8.50; 9am-1pm & 3-6pm Mon-Fri, 9am-1pm Sat).
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BERGEN-BELSEN
Visiting a former concentration camp memor-ial in Germany is a moving but also challenging experience, and Bergen-Belsen ( 05051-6011; www.bergenbelsen.de; Lohheide; admission free; 9am-6pm Apr-Sep, to 5pm Oct-Mar) is no exception – it provides a horrifying punch to the stomach through the sheer force of its atmosphere.
Unlike Auschwitz in Poland, none of the original buildings remain from the most infamous concentration camp on German soil. Yet the large, initially peaceful-looking lumps of grassy earth – covered in beautiful purple heather in summer – soon reveal their true identity as mass graves. Signs indicate approximately how many people lie in each – 1000, 2000, 5000, an unknown number…
In all, 70,000 Jews, Soviet soldiers, political hostages and other prisoners died here. Among them was Anne Frank, whose posthumously published diary became a modern classic.
Bergen-Belsen began its existence in 1940 as a POW camp, but was partly taken over by the SS from April 1943, to hold Jews as hostages in exchange for German POWs held abroad. Many Russian and Allied soldiers, then later Jews, Poles, homosexuals, Sinti and Roma all suffered here – beaten, tortured, starved and worked to death, or used as medical guinea pigs.
Tens of thousands of prisoners from other camps near the front line were brought to Belsen in the last months of WWII, causing overcrowding, an outbreak of disease and even more deaths. Despite the best attempts of the SS to hide evidence of their inhumane practices, by destroying documents and forcing prisoners to bury or incinerate their deceased fellow inmates, thousands of corpses still littered the compound when British troops liberated the camp on 15 April 1945.
After WWII, Allied forces used the troop barracks here as a displaced persons’ (DP) camp, for those waiting to emigrate to a third country (including many Jews who went to Israel after its establishment in 1948). The DP camp was closed in September 1950.
The revamped Documentation Centre today is one of the best of its kind and deals sensitively but very poignantly with the lives of the people who were imprisoned here – before, during and after incarceration. The exhibition is designed to be viewed chronologically, and these days a better focus is placed on the role of Bergen-Belsen in the early years as a POW camp for mostly Soviet prisoners of war. About 40,000 POWs died here in 1939–42, largely due to atrocious conditions. As you move through the exhibition you listen to original-language descriptions through headphones (also subtitled on the screens), read documents and explanations, and watch a 25-minute documentary about the camp. This film includes a moving testimony from one of the British cameramen who filmed the liberation. Subtitled screenings rotate between different languages.
Also inside the centre, there’s a book of names of those who were interned here, as well as guides and books for sale, including The Diary of Anne Frank (1947), plus the free Guided Tour Memorial of Bergen-Belsen.
In the several hectares of cemetery within