Liberating Belsen Concentration Camp

Leonard Berney (1920-2016) was born in London. After leaving St Paul's School, Hammersmith, in 1938, he joined the Territorial Army as a Second Lieutenant. At the beginning of 1939, he and his Anti-Aircraft Regiment were mobilized for full-time military service in the defence of London. He took part countering The Blitz and the V1 flying bomb attacks. In August 1944, he was in Normandy as the Staff Officer, Anti-Aircraft Defence, of XIII Corps of the British 21st Army. This is his personal account of his experience of the Liberation of Belsen Concentration Camp and as the Commander of the Belsen Camp for Displaced Persons that housed the survivors. Following his time at Belsen, he was appointed Military Governor of Schleswig-Holstein and was released from the army at the end of 1946, rank of Lieutenant-Colonel. He pursued a business career until he retired. In his latter years, Leonard Berney was regularly asked to deliver lectures on the Liberation of Belsen by groups such as Congregation Ner Tamid, Las Vegas and Greenwich University, London and he was often asked to take part in documentaries about the Holocaust such as "Night Will Fall" which was broadcast on television in over twenty countries around the world to mark the 70th Holocaust Memorial Day 2015, as well as "No Asylum" about Anne Frank and her family. For the last seven years of his life, Leonard lived on the residential ship MS The World. In his 95th year when he wrote this book, he was one of the very few surviving liberators of the infamous Bergen-Belsen Concentration Camp.