It was a “lovely spring day” when Corporal Ian Forsyth arrived at a place of darkness and death. The 21-year-old wireless operator with the 15th/19th King’s Royal Hussars was among the first British troops to reach the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northern Germany 75 years ago this week.
“We weren’t expecting to see anything – we didn’t know there was such a place. We had been going ahead without any idea there was anything there. I think that was the worst part,” Forsyth, now 96, recalls.
What he and other British soldiers found on 15 April 1945 was beyond comprehension. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing – I couldn’t believe … people could sink to that level, and treat people the way they treated these prisoners,” he says. “When you see a person who is a living skeleton, as these people were, it’s difficult. It’s astonishing that any human being could survive the terrible torture …
“Anybody who didn’t see the place as we saw it would find it very difficult to believe what we actually saw. Bodies stretched out on the ground. Nobody had the strength to move them. The people on the other side of the barbed wire didn’t know who we were – they just stared as we approached.”