Liberators and the Liberated

Photograph taken at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp of liberated concentration camp prisoners mingling with their liberators. The photograph was taken by Alan Moore in April 1945. Australian war artist, Lieutenant Alan Moore had been commissioned to depict the activities of the RAAF working in New Guinea, the Middle East and Europe. Towards the end of the war he was posted to Germany to sketch the prisoner of war camps. Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was established in 1940 at the outskirts of the small Northern German village of Bergen. As Allied and Soviet forces advanced into Germany from late 1944, Bergen-Belsen became a collection point for Jewish prisoners evacuated from other camps. Tens of thousands of new prisoners, many of them survivors of death marches, overwhelmed the already insufficient resources of the camp and vastly increased the outbreak of diseases. By the time British and Canadian forces entered Bergen-Belsen on 15 April 1945, there were 60,000 people starving, sick and dying in the camp. British Army film and photographic units were posted to Bergen-Belsen to record these terrible scenes. Moore was attached to one of these units as it advanced across occupied Europe.

Whilst at Belsen, Moore made several paintings, sketches and drawings as a record of Nazi atrocities committed against the predominantly Jewish inmates.

“I was drawing madly. It was one of the pits where we got the SS to get bodies out and bury them quickly, otherwise plague would set in. One of the troops said, ‘You’re mad doing that, people will think that you’ve just made it up’. He said, ‘Why don’t you take a roll of snaps’. I took a roll of 35mm photographs, which I’ve still got. They show everything that was there.”

Images such as this one documents the indescribable horrors and caused Bergen-Belsen to emerge in 1945 as a symbol of Nazi terror and the Holocaust.