Queen Elizabeth Visits Former Nazi Death Camp Where Anne Frank Died

Queen Elizabeth II has ended a four-day tour of Germany with a visit to Bergen-Belsen, one of the most notorious concentration camps to have existed during the Nazi regime.

More than 70,000 people died at Bergen-Belsen, including the wartime diarist Anne Frank and her sister Margot. Anne, whose diary was published posthumously and is perhaps the most famous piece of writing to come out of the Holocaust, was 15 when she died of a typhus epidemic in the camp, just a short time before British troops liberated Belsen on April 15, 1945.

The queen and her husband Prince Philip visited the mass graves where the camp’s victims, including Anne and Margot, are buried, before laying a wreath together at the memorial wall. Mostly Jews, Roma gypsies and Soviet prisoners of war were imprisoned in Belsen, dying in their thousands from starvation and disease.

“It must have been horrific,” the queen said to Captain Eric Brown, who was part of the British forces who liberated the camp 70 years ago, and who told the queen that they had been confronted with “a field of corpses” on arrival.

“She was listening very carefully,” Brown said later. “I would say she was quite affected by the atmosphere here. You can’t avoid it, can you?”

Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a survivor of Bergen-Belsen and who at 89 years old is the same age of the queen, told the monarch, “It was more like dying, not living.

“There was nothing, it was the end, there was no food, nothing. The only reason anyone survived was because the British came in time.”

The queen and Philip also spent some time in the House of Silence, a building with a glass roof that is intended to provide a place of contemplation for visitors to the site.

During her visit the queen also met with the UK’s chief rabbi, Ephraim Mirvis, who later said, “I told the queen that the Jewish world appreciates enormously her gesture in coming here, because it shows her solidarity with our pain and suffering.”

Brown said he saw the visit as being in the “spirit of reconciliation” and as a message to young Germans to “not to feel too much guilt about it now, it didn’t happen in their generation.”