Bergen-Belsen Memorial Clearings and passages

The historical camp is made visible again with a simple and scenic strategy. Access is the key to understanding.



The film footage of the British liberators made Bergen-Belsen infamous worldwide. In the post-war period, the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp memorial was designed as an idyllic heath landscape. Forest has grown up on the remaining part of the camp site.



The landscape concept proposes a "sculptural" strategy: Clearings in the trees reveal the boundaries and spatial structures of the camp. A central grass corridor along the historic camp road serves as an orientation passage over a length of more than one kilometer. Along this significant figure for the camp, the prisoner areas are marked and explained with stone bookmarks. The post-war design, which is controversial today, is superimposed but not destroyed.



The new access to the site, the stone path, is connected to the new documentation house. The site thus becomes a space for imagining what can be seen in the exhibition.



Without the visitor's knowledge of the historical events at this site, landscape architecture does nothing here.