Belsen And Its Liberation Images Of War Rare Photographs From Wartime Archives Reissue Ian Baxter by Ian Baxter 9781473838598, 9781781593318, 1473838592, 1781593310 instant download after payment.

Publishers Warning: THIS BOOK CONTAINS IMAGES AND TEXT THAT SOME PEOPLE MAY FIND DISTURBING.

This latest title by Military Historian Ian Baxter records the history of one of the Reich's most infamous Konzentrationslager - KZ Belsen. Starting with its construction in 1935 and its initial use as a Panzertruppen training centre from 1937, the Author goes onto describe how it was turned into a POW Camp (Stalag XI) from September 1939 through to April 1943. Originally made up of 4 individual POW compounds (A-D), in April 1943 one of these compounds - C - was handed over to the SS at their request for conversion into a Konzentrationslager. In August 1944 a new women's camp was also established within the main compound which at its peak held an estimated total of 9000 women and girls of all ages. A large proportion of the detained women prisoners came from The Netherlands, Hungary, Salonica, Czechoslovakia and Warsaw (resistance fighters captured in the failed uprising of 1944), and its notoriety stemmed from both the unspeakable acts perpetuated on the inmates by its female SS Guard detachment - several of which were later executed for War Crimes - and the fact that during February-March 1945 both Anne Frank and her older sister Margot were to succumb to illness and mistreatment while detained within the women's camp. Unlike other extermination camps there were no gas chambers at Bergen, its inmates were murdered through extreme and unimaginable acts of cruelty, starvation, experimentation and illness. An additional difference to that of other locations was that the detainees in both the male and female camps inside the compound were also not just Jewish, but included large numbers of LGBTIQ+ women, cross dressers and what we now refer to as being Transgender, along with members of the Roma and Sinti Population. This disturbing history of barbarism also covers the camps eventual liberation, desperate efforts to save the detainees, and the resulting War Crimes Trials.