Today, as we take a day off from cycling to visit the Emigration museum in Bremerhaven (with help from German Rail and 49 euro monthly national roaming tickets), I’ll let pictures of the former concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen, on our road from Hanover to Luneburg, speak for themselves.

Liberated by the British army in the closing weeks of world war two, Bergen-Belsen with its tens of thousands of dying and dead became one of the symbols in the UK for Germany’s years of Nazi dictatorship.

As we know again from what Russia is doing to Ukraine, and from what Serbia did to Bosnia-Hercegovina and Croatia 30 years ago, human beings, not just Germans, are capable of doing unspeakable things to each other.

Food for thought.

(Note that all the camp barracks were burnt to the ground under British orders in the summer of 1945, to clear the area of infections and disease.)