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Friday, 26 June 2015

Queen visits Germany's Bergen-Belsen concentration camp site



The Queen has made her first visit to a World War Two concentration camp, Bergen-Belsen, in northern Germany.

The camp, where teenage diarist Anne Frank was among thousands to die, was liberated by British soldiers in 1945.
The UK monarch, accompanied by the Duke of Edinburgh, laid a wreath at a memorial there on the final day of her four-day state visit to Germany.
She met British veterans who liberated the camp, and heard stories of the "horrific" scenes that greeted them.
More than 50,000 prisoners from all over Europe were killed at Bergen-Belsen or died later as a result of their treatment in the camp.


This was a Queen who lived through World War Two as a teenager, coming to learn first-hand about some of the very worst excesses of a former enemy.
With Prince Philip she passed the mounds that mark where the mass graves are. There are 13 mounds. They contain the remains of more than 20,000 people.
There was no pomp or ceremony; just a couple from the wartime generation taking their time to reflect and to pay their respects.
The 89-year-old Queen and her husband, who's 94, walked quite a distance through what remains of the camp, and met a few of those who lived and three of the British soldiers who set them free. The survivors and the liberators told them about their shared experience of horror.
At the end the Queen said to one person: "It's difficult to imagine isn't it?"

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