Word: bergener
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...Washington, a State Department official conceded that presidential advance teams often "swarm all over our embassies and reduce local protocol to rubble." In this case the ghoulish exercise of selecting a death camp for Reagan to visit appalled many Germans. White House aides would not explain just why Bergen-Belsen was finally chosen. It is conveniently close to Frankfurt, its park-like setting is photogenic, and, since the camp was burned to the ground in 1945, there is little to remind visitors of its gruesome past except a monument...
Kohl confronted his nation's continued anguish in a speech prepared for delivery Sunday at Bergen-Belsen, where he had long planned to make his first official V-E day observance. "Bergen-Belsen, a place in the center of Germany," he said, "remains the mark of Cain burned into the memory of our people . . . the site of a deluded will to destruction." Kohl recalled that the Nazis' "totalitarian regime was directed mainly against the Jews . . . The decisive question is why so many people remained indifferent . . . even if Auschwitz was beyond the power of human comprehension, the unscrupulous brutality...
...called Provisional Camp Bergen-Belsen because, unlike other concentration camps, it was originally designed as a "holding pen" for Jews who were to be exchanged for German prisoners of war. Established in 1943, near Hanover in northwestern Germany, Bergen-Belsen was built to contain 10,000 prisoners and was run, like all the camps, by the SS. In 1944 the commandant, SS Major Josef Kramer, later known as the Beast of Belsen, began accepting inmates from other camps who were too frail to continue their slave labor. The population of 15,000 Jews was swollen by thousands of new prisoners...
...Bergen-Belsen was liberated by British troops on April 15, 1945. Those soldiers included Brian Urquhart, now Under Secretary-General of the United Nations. "At first I saw what appeared to be a wall of logs, stacked like cordwood," Urquhart recalls. "But as I got closer, I saw it was actually unburied corpses." British soldiers discovered nearly 10,000 such corpses, as well as mass graves containing hundreds of bodies plowed under by bulldozers. But it was difficult to distinguish the living from the dead. According to an English reporter on the scene, "dead bodies, black-and-blue and bloated...
...Discovery Channel offered free screenings of SuperVolcano at several other colleges as well, Bergen said...