TODAY marks the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Belsen, the concentration camp whose name has become synonymous with Nazi war crimes.

It was on April 15, 1945, when men of the British 11th Armoured Division moved in to find 60,000 half-starved and seriously ill prisoners and 13,000 unburied corpses.

The following day, Lieutenant Jack Ibbotson, from Blackburn, arrived at its gates – and the sights he faced on his birthday have stayed with him a lifetime.

Jack, now 96, told Bygones: “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, when I was one of a group of officers sent to ‘help take over’ a concentration camp.

“Little did we know then that it was Belsen, but once we were within a mile of the camp we were conscious of an eerie silence all around, and that there was a total lack of bird life.”

He went on: “I was there for six weeks and the sights were pitiful – there were thousands of ragged, starving and desperately ill prisoners, some of them clutching dead babies and infants – and thousands of bodies laying where they had fallen.

“Some of the prisoners tried to hide the corpses of their loved ones from us, as they couldn’t face being parted and we had to gently take them away.

Jack added: “We made the German soldiers still left round up the bodies and bury them in huge pits which were dug – 5,000 to a pit.

“I have this abiding memory of piles of corpses, I believe there were 1,000 people dying every day after the liberation.

“Of course, we had to take great care of those who were still alive and we turned some of the barracks into hospitals and began the slow process of de-lousing the men, women and children, giving them emergency medical care, clothing and, of course, feeding them.”

Jack had been 20 when he was called up to the Royal Artillery in 1939 and spent his 21st birthday aboard a ship to Norway with the 56th Regiment in 1940.

A year later he was posted to the 70th Light Anti Aircraft Regiment (TA) and until 1943 was a troop sergeant manning anti aircraft guns to protect Prime Minster Winston Churchill. Eager to see more action he applied for a commission just in time for the D-Day landings and went to France two days later as a replacement officer with the rank of lieutenant.

As the front moved, so did he and the guns, providing cover through Ardennes and during the operation to cross the Rhine at Wesel.

Jack said: “As the Allies advanced the Germans waved a white flag of truce and Belsen was handed over without a fight.

“An exclusion zone of many square miles was created, to prevent disease, such as typhus from spreading – that was when we were sent in.

“Over the ensuing days the survivors were de-loused and moved to another camp, which became known as the displaced persons camp.”

“At the end, we burned the huts and camp to the ground, to destroy the typhus epidemic and infestations.”