Mass Grave Found At Belsen Concentration Camp

A mass grave has been found by Dutch scientists at the Belsen concentration camp. The Nazis massacred 70,000 at this spot, between 1941 and 1945.

The mass grave is 16 meters by 4 meters, and was indicated by the earlier prisoners' testimony. This is the spot where the Dutch Resistance activist Jan Verschure was buried, according to rt.

Verschure's grandson asked a lot of survivors, and finally found the grave. "One of them gave me a map on which he marked where my grandfather was buried," Verschure told Dutch TV program, Nieuwsuur. Most of the 70,000 prisoners who had been killed here over the five years had been buried into "unmarked mass graves" around the spot, while upto 10,000 are interred in the camp area.

A burial pit near the grave may also contain the remains of Anne Frank, according to daily mail. The diarist Anne, who was15 when she died, her sister Margot and Jan Verschure, a member of the Dutch resistance, were all buried here.

Mr Verschure's grandson Paul spoke to a number of survivors, and searched for the burial pit with a team of Dutch archaeologists.

He said: "One of them gave me a map on which he marked where my grandfather was buried."

One of the British soldiers, Major Leonard Berney, recalls some of the horrors he witnessed, according to mirror.

"As we drove along the camp's main road we saw bodies lying beside the road and many hundreds of emaciated men and women prisoners still mostly behind barbed wire. There were corpses littering the ground and piles of corpses everywhere. At the end of the road a large open mass grave contained hundreds. The sights, the stench, the sheer horror of the place, were indescribable.We had had no warning of what we were about to see and I remember being completely shattered."

Today, the grassy park over the grave is at the end of the camp's main road.

Ivar Schute, an archeologist, who probed into the spot, agreed that the mass grave there was identified due to the "disturbed ground."

Yet, the local Jewish community laws have not permitted digging on the spot, "according to religious laws," hence more investigation is not possible, said Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the Belsen memorial.

"In any case, the whole camp has been declared a cemetery," he said.

The UK troops that invaded and "liberated" Belsen on April 15, 1945, had immediately torched the area in order to prevent the spread of illnesses such as typhus.