Jews with foreign passports were kept at Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp to be exchanged for German nationals imprisoned abroad, although very few exchanges were made. About 200 Jews were allowed to immigrate to Palestine and about 1,500 Hungarian Jews were allowed to immigrate to Switzerland, both took place under the rubric of exchanges for German nationals.
Serving as a holding camp for Jewish prisoners, the camp was separated into eight different sections.
1 A detention Camp
2 and 3 Womens Camps
4 A special Camp
5 Neutrals Camps
6 “Star” Camps(Dutch Prisoners wearing a star of David instead of camp uniform)
7 Hungarian Camp, and
8 a Tent Camp.
It was designed to hold 10,000 prisoners, however, by the war’s end more than 60,000 prisoners were detained there, due to the large numbers of those evacuated from Auschwitz and other camps from the East. Tens of thousands of prisoners from other camps came to Bergen-Belsen after agonizing death marches.
While Bergen-Belsen contained no gas chambers, more than 35,000 people died of starvation, overwork, disease, brutality, and sadistic medical experiments.
Anne Frank and her sister, Margot, died of typhus in March 1945, along with other prisoners in a typhus epidemic.
On April 15, 1945, Bergen-Belsen was liberated by the British. As the first major camp to be liberated by the allies, the event received a lot of press coverage and the world saw the horrors of the Holocaust. Sixty-thousand prisoners were present at the time of liberation. Afterwards, about 500 people died daily of starvation and typhus, reaching nearly 14,000. Mass graves were made to hold the thousands of corpses of those who perished.