One of the slightly unlikely elements of the camp at Bergen-Belsen was the number of Russian prisoners held there. And so these pictures record the Russian cemetery and the Belarus Ambassador to Germany (?) leading the tributes (below - suited).This was essentially due to it's being used as a prisoner of war camp initially. It's only later that it was used for Jewish and civillian prisoners and then subsequently as a concentration camp.
So it is that over 50,000 Russians lie buried here... a truly awful number of people. And of course being so far removed from Russia, in western Germany, it's one of the more over-looked elements.
The burial mounds are all laid out and marked with a brown stone witha slavic cross - the number of them is the most daunting feature of the graveyard.The other element that is so stark is just how far away from the document centre and the Jewish memorial the Russian monument is...
It adds to the sense of a forgotten sacrifice and reveals a small element of the tensions that existed.
Further, it also illustrates the size of the camp when in operation and the extent to which the forest has since encroached back. The other factor is that actually the prisoners in the camp were themselves segregated and kept very very much apart...
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Also of course Soviet POWs were considered traitors by their own side - massive numbers of surviving POWS who repatriated to the USSR in 1945 and 1946 were automatically charged on arrival and sent to the Gulag.
I suspect the current memorials are very much a recent innovation... am I wrong?
Actually and interestingly this memorial was pretty immediate after the war - the scale of the deaths in this one camp were so high as a ratio of prisoners held... but certainly the issue for the returning survivors was often pretty grim...
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