RUTH TUREK blinked back tears in Belsen concentration camp yesterday and recalled the moment, 60 years ago, that the British Army moved in. “It was funny, just like today and the soldiers seem to come like angels,” she said.

The day that the British saved the life of the 17-year-old Polish Jew was also the day that the Holocaust came home to Britain. The piles of corpses; the sweet stench of decaying flesh; the dazed, emaciated inmates: they became almost instantly part of the icon- ography of war crimes. Richard Dimbleby, the BBC reporter on the scene, broke down five times trying to record his account of the liberated camp.

The BBC demanded confirmation from other sources. Dimbleby threatened to resign. Eventually, on April 19, four days after the arrival of the troops, his account stunned Britain. “Behind the huts, two youths and two girls who had found a morsel of food were sitting together on the grass in picnic fashion, sharing it. They were not six feet from a pile of decomposing bodies.”

Other camps had been liberated by April 15, but did not have such a raw impact on Britain. “For me as a British schoolboy in the 1970s, it was Belsen rather than Auschwitz which represented the Holocaust,” said the historian Stephen Smith, who went on to head the Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Nottingham. “Not just because of the horrific skeletal pictures, but also because it was so connected to my own country.” The shock permeated first through the accounts of liberating soldiers, members of the Second Army who had seen some savage fighting. Most of the gritty photographs from the first days of liberation, as the British Army tried to make sense of the chaotic scenes — much of the camp seemed to be dying of typhoid fever — were taken by soldiers.

“And they didn’t go back to barrack rooms cut off from the world; they returned to their homes in Glasgow, Manchester and Telford,” Dr Smith said. “That sent a powerful word-of-mouth message and most of the Tommies were saying: ‘Now I know what we were fighting for.’ ”

Most of the liberators are now too old to travel. Charles Salt, 84 — a military policeman who helped to arrest the vicious camp warden Irma Grese — travelled to the camp yesterday with his wife, Renee, who had been an inmate. Belsen brought them together.

“Soon after taking over at the Holocaust centre,” Dr Smith said, “I was called to the home of an old soldier who said he needed to talk about Belsen after decades of silence. ‘I feel almost guilty about it,’ he said, ‘so ashamed.’ ”

Frank Chapman, who drove the bulldozer that piled the naked corpses into communal graves, remained scarred by his camp experience until his death 18 months ago.

The liberation of Belsen was the first real wartime media event in the modern sense. The first correspondent on the ground was John D’Arcy- Dawson, the Sunday Times reporter, who arrived early enough to see the camp commander, Josef Kramer, led half-naked past his former inmates. The reporter watched as the commanding officer, Lieutenant-Colonel Taylor, turned to Kramer and spat to an interpreter: “Tell him that when he hangs I hope he hangs slowly.” British officers did not usually talk like that in the presence of reporters.

Kramer did, indeed, hang — some 70,000 inmates had died because of his neglect, incompetence or cruelty — and the British-led trials of the Belsen staff were a revelation for the British public. It marked the beginning of an intense period of anti-German sentiment in Britain.

Correspondents poured into the camp. The Holocaust was on British kitchen tables. Army film units, with Alfred Hitchcock’s involvement, produced stomach-curdling footage. The British at home, though battered, had no previous idea of how it looked to die of hunger. Some of the pictures emerging showed naked bodies with missing hearts and livers, clearly cannibalised.

Although later Auschwitz was to take the central position in the narrative of the Holocaust, it was Belsen that provided the most immediate, the most graphic account. “When I talk to ordinary Britons who were 10 or 8 at the time of Belsen,” Dr Smith said, “they will often tell me: ‘That was the day I grew up and realised the world was not a nice place.’ ”

Anne Frank, the Dutch schoolgirl, was the most prominent victim of Belsen, but the liberators and their accompanying press corps would also rise to prominence, ensuring that Belsen continued to shape the consciousness of a generation.

Among the liberating soldiers was Chaim Herzog, later President of Israel. Among the BBC team was Patrick Gordon Walker, later a Member of Parliament and Foreign Secretary. Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a cellist who had played for her life in the Auschwitz camp orchestra, ran unsteadily towards Gordon Walker after the liberation and gave an emotional interview to the BBC.

“It was repeated several times and showed the people in England that it was possible to be Jewish in Germany and still be alive,” she says.

Explore World News

• World Agenda

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Afghanistan News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• A doctor, a daughter and a man called Johnny
• Mona Lisa's smile may belie ill health
• ‘Parasite economy’ lies behind Greek tragedy