The countless bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 were bodies that had been piled up after prisoners had been shot dead by Nazi Germany during the Holocaust.

　　The countless bodies at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in April 1945 were photographed as evidence of the Holocaust, and conveyed the horrific conditions of the Nazi death camps. These were the bodies of prisoners who had been shot and then piled up. Some of the bodies in the pile had a slim chance of survival. The bodies were naked or partially clothed. The bodies were a gruesome sight, skeletons covered in skin, all their muscles gone. There were also the bodies of small children, mixed in with the adults. Around the camp, hundreds of bodies lay scattered, often piled five or six high.

　　The Bergen-Belsen concentration camp was liberated by the British Army on April 15th 1945. The British soldiers found around 60,000 prisoners inside. Most of the prisoners were half-starved and seriously ill. In addition, 13,000 bodies were lying around the camp without being buried. From 1941 to 1945, almost 20,000 Soviet prisoners of war and another 50,000 prisoners died in the camp. Overcrowding, food shortages, and poor hygiene led to outbreaks of infectious diseases such as typhus, tuberculosis, typhoid, and dysentery. More than 35,000 people died in the first few months of 1945, just before and after liberation.

　　As the Allied forces approached Germany at the end of 1944 and beginning of 1945, Bergen-Belsen became a camp for tens of thousands of prisoners evacuated from camps near the front. The rate of death among prisoners at Bergen-Belsen accelerated markedly in December 1944 with the mass transfer of prisoners from other camps. From 1943 to the end of 1944, about 3,100 people died. From January to mid-April 1945, the number of deaths rose sharply to about 35,000. Between April 15 and the end of June 1945, a further 14,000 prisoners died in the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp under British military authorities.