British Bergen-Belsen Liberator Dies Aged 95

The first British officer to liberate the Bergen-Belsen Nazi concentration camp has died.

Lt Col Leonard Berney passed away on the Caribbean island of St Vincent. The 95-year-old suffered a heart attack on Monday.

His son said he was “a very kind, generous and highly intelligent man; and he lived a full and remarkable life.”

He spent the past six years sailing the globe living onboard the luxury residential ship, The World.

Leonard Berney went into the Bergen-Belsen camp on 15 April 1945. The images he saw that day haunted him into old age.

In an interview with Sky News last year, on the 70th anniversary of the liberation, Lt Col Berney said he had no idea what he was going to see.

“When we went into the camp, what we were met with was absolute shock and horror,” he said. “We had no conception of what we were going to see at all.

"At the very end of the camp there was a big mass grave, about the length of a tennis court I suppose, with hundreds of corpses already in it.

"We’d been fighting battle after battle from Normandy for 10 months up to that time when we got to the camp, and we were used to seeing casualties and people killed, but never, never had we seen anything like this at all.”

It is thought as many as 70,000 people died in the camp, many from typhus, after it was liberated.

“The people that were there were mostly emaciated, walking skeletons, in a complete daze,” said Col Berney. “They didn’t really realise they were being rescued. There were a few in a better condition, some wearing prison clothes, some wearing rags.

"I remember it was a real Dante’s Inferno. I will never forget it.”