Editing Bergen-Belsen concentration camp (section)

===Prisoner of war camp===
[[File:Bergen-Belsen - 2018-02-26 (088).jpg|thumb|upright=0.7|Memorial to Soviet prisoners of war]]
In 1935, the [[Wehrmacht]] began to build a large military complex close to the village of [[Belsen (Bergen)|Belsen]], a part of the town of Bergen, in what was then the [[Province of Hanover]].<ref name="Memorial website"/> This became the largest military training area in Germany of the time and was used for armoured vehicle training.<ref name="Memorial website"/> The barracks were finished in 1937. The camp has been in continuous operation since then and is today known as [[Bergen-Hohne Training Area]]. It is used by the [[NATO]] armed forces.

The workers who constructed the original buildings were housed in camps near [[Fallingbostel]] and Bergen, the latter being the so-called Bergen-Belsen Army Construction Camp.<ref name="Memorial website"/> Once the military complex was completed in 1938–39, the workers' camp fell into disuse. However, after the [[German invasion of Poland]] in September 1939, the ''Wehrmacht'' began using the huts as a [[prisoner of war]] (POW) camp.

The camp of huts near Fallingbostel became known as [[Stalag XI-B]] and was to become one of the ''Wehrmacht''{{'}}s largest POW camps, holding up to 95,000 prisoners from various countries.<ref name="Memorial website2">{{cite web|url=http://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/POW_Camps.html|title=POW Camps|access-date=April 3, 2012|url-status=dead|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20131016093251/http://bergen-belsen.stiftung-ng.de/en/history/POW_Camps.html|archive-date=October 16, 2013|df=mdy-all}}</ref> In June 1940, Belgian and French POWs were housed in the former Bergen-Belsen construction workers' camp. This installation was significantly expanded from June 1941, once Germany prepared to invade the Soviet Union, becoming an independent camp known as [[Stalag XI-C]] (311). It was intended to hold up to 20,000 [[Soviet Union|Soviet]] POWs and was one of three such camps in the area. The others were at [[Oerbke]] (Stalag XI-D (321)) and [[Wietzendorf]] (Stalag X-D (310)). By the end of March 1942, some 41,000 Soviet POWs had died in these three camps of starvation, exhaustion, and disease. By the end of the war, the total number of dead had increased to 50,000.<ref name="Memorial website2"/> When the POW camp in Bergen ceased operation in early 1945, as the ''Wehrmacht'' handed it over to the [[SS]], the cemetery contained over 19,500 dead Soviet prisoners.

In the summer of 1943, Stalag XI-C (311) was dissolved and Bergen-Belsen became a branch camp of Stalag XI-B. It served as the hospital for all Soviet POWs in the region until January 1945. Other inmates/patients were Italian military internees from August 1944 and, following the suppression of the [[Warsaw Uprising]] in October 1944, around 1,000 members of the [[Polish Home Army]] were imprisoned in a separate section of the POW camp.<ref name="Memorial website2"/>