Just days before the Germans surrendered, British soldiers set off through the woods of Northern Germany in search of a ‘refugee’ camp.

The previous day, a German officer had agreed to hand the camp over to the advancing British.

With only a map reference to guide them, they wandered through the gloom of the dense trees.

Suddenly the refugee camp was before them – a vast concentration camp surrounded by 10ft high barbed-wire fence, and heavily guarded.

On April 15, 1945, this troop of British soldiers had unwittingly liberated Bergen Belsen, near Hanover, one of the Nazis’ most infamous concentration camps.

Bodies lay scattered around the dusty ground, some tangled amid the barbed wire surrounding the camp, others lying in hastily dug graves.

The dying hung onto their life by a thread as disease ravaged their already emaciated bodies.

This was what the Nazis called the ‘final solution of the Jewish question in Europe’. A‘solution’ which meant the brutal murder of six million Jews.

Overall, as many as 15 millions civilians were killed by the Nazis, including Slavs, ‘asiatics’ and gypsies.

Daily Echo:

Some 50,000 prisoners perished at Belsen, among them the diarist Anne Frank, together with 20,000 PoWs.

When the British soldiers arrived, they set about improving living conditions and feeding the malnourished prisoners.

Major Dick Williams, one of the British liberators, who hailed from Fareham, said: “At the gate of the camp there was nothing visible, but as I moved forward I started seeing exactly what was there.

“On the immediate left there was rows of huts with barbed wire around them. I had to weave my way forward through the bodies on the ground.

“What struck me was the quietness of the place – no birds were singing.

“There was not a blade of grass anywhere.

Daily Echo:

“Outside the hospital block a pile of bodies was stacked, eight high and 20 yards wide.

“My job was to see whether there was food and water.

“When I went to the cookhouse, all I found was 50kg of rotting turnips. The prisoners were emaciated, absolutely shrunken.

“And yet it took just a day for (British) engineers to restore the water supply.

“This wasn’t a death camp, but a camp of death. It was a wilful deprivation of food and water.”

The Holocaust is one of the most brutal episodes in world history.

The Nazis were the heirs of a centuries old tradition of Jew-hatred, rooted in religious rivalry and found in all European countries.

When the Nazis came to carry out their genocidal programme, they found collaborators in all the countries they dominated, including governments that enjoyed considerable public support.

Most people drew the line at mass murder, but relatively few could be found to oppose it actively or to extend help to the Jews.

When the Nazis occupied western Poland in 1939, two-thirds of Polish Jews – Europe's largest Jewish community – fell into their hands.

The Polish Jews were rounded up and placed in ghettos, where it is estimated that 500,000 people died of starvation and disease.

Nazi policy at this point was aimed at forced emigration and isolation of the Jews rather than mass murder, but large numbers were to die through attrition.

But with the invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22 1941, the Nazis launched a crusade against ‘Judaeo-Bolshevism’, the supposed Jewish Communist conspiracy. Behind the front lines, four police battalions called Einsatzgruppen (operations groups) moved from town to town in the newly occupied Soviet territories, rounding up Jewish men and suspected Soviet collaborators and shooting them.

In subsequent sweeps, making heavy use of local volunteers, the Einsatzgruppen targeted Jewish women and children as well. In total, the Einsaztgruppen murdered some two million people, almost all Jews.

While these massacres were happening, the Nazis elsewhere were laying plans for an overall ‘solution to the Jewish question’. Death camp operations began in December 1941 at Semlin in Serbia and Chelmno in Poland, where people were killed by exhaust fumes in specially modified vans, which were then driven to nearby sites where the bodies were plundered and burnt.

When Allied forces began to close in on Germany, prisoners were force-marched to camps within Germany, such as Belsen.

When those British soldiers came across the camp in 1945, yet more sickening evidence of the Nazi ‘final solution’ was discovered.

In 2005 Major Williams recently gave a seminar at the Imperial War Museum in London about his experiences in Belsen.

He said: “My generation know all about Belsen. But those of us who lived through it are dying out.

“Young people don’t know enough about it and soon we won’t be here to share our experiences first hand.

“But one thing is for sure, I will never forget the horror I saw there."

Daily Echo: