Dan Stone discusses what the British found at Belsen in April 1945 and how they understood the camp, in the immediate post-liberation period. Through examining the British approach to dealing with the survivors, noting that criticism of the feeding regime and medical care needs to be carefully contextualised, Dan also shows that the common misidentification of Belsen as a death camp was not wholly inappropriate, given the huge numbers of inmates who died there in the last months of the war.

Dan also explains how the the aftermath of the liberation was never just a British affair; rather, from medical care to identifying the dead to tracing survivors (a topic which is rarely discussed), everything associated with the administration of Belsen, though it was headed by the British occupation forces and civilian authorities, required international assistance.

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at RHUL. He is a historian of ideas who works primarily on twentieth-century European history. His research interests include: the history and interpretation of the Holocaust, comparative genocide, history of anthropology, history of fascism, the cultural history of the British Right and theory of history.

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