April 17th, 1945. Bergen Bellson, Northern Germany. The gates of the concentration camp swung open, but not for prisoners this time. Instead, a long line of well-dressed German citizens walked through, their faces already twisted in disgust. Canadian soldiers stood on both sides of the path, their rifles ready, their eyes cold and hard.

 These soldiers had just liberated this place of death 2 days before. Now they were bringing the town’s richest and most important people to see what had been hidden just 5 kilometers from their comfortable homes. The German women wore their best fur coats. The men had on clean suits and polished shoes. They looked like they were going to church or a fancy dinner party.

 But the smell hit them before they saw anything else. It was the smell of death, of rotting bodies, of human waste and sickness all mixed together. Some of the Germans covered their noses with handkerchiefs. Others bent over and threw up right there on the path. Some Germans tried to turn back, but Canadian soldiers blocked their way, voices quiet but firm.

 This is exactly what the title promises. This is the day Canadian liberators made Germany’s elite confront the horror they had ignored for years. The soldiers marched them deeper into the camp, past things no human eyes should ever have to see. There were piles of bodies stacked like firewood along the fence. The dead were nothing but skin stretched over bones.

 Their eyes were sunken into their skulls. Their mouths hung open as if frozen in their final screams. The Canadian soldiers made the German civilians stop and look at each pile. No one was allowed to look away. A German mayor started to cry. He said he did not know this place existed. A Canadian sergeant pointed at the bodies.

 This camp is 5 km from your town hall. You could smell this from your office window. Everyone knew. You just did not want to look. The mayor had no answer. He just stood there, tears running down his fat, healthy cheeks, while all around him lay people who had starved to death. But the bodies on the ground were not the worst part.

 Inside the long wooden barracks, people were still alive, barely. The prisoners wore striped uniforms that hung off their skeletal frames. Most were too weak to even sit up. They lay on wooden bunks with no mattresses, their bodies covered in soores and lice. Some looked at the well-fed Germans walking past. Others did not have the strength to turn their heads.

A few reached out with stick thin arms, begging for food or water. The German civilians looked away from those reaching hands. The Canadian soldiers made them look back. There were 60,000 prisoners still alive in this camp when the British and Canadian forces arrived on April 15th. But alive is almost the wrong word.

Hundreds were dying every single day. Even though they were now free, their bodies were too broken to recover. There were over 10,000 dead bodies lying in the open when the soldiers first got there. The Nazis had not even bothered to bury them anymore. They just left them where they fell. The war was almost over.

 Everyone knew it. The Allied armies were closing in from all sides. Adolf Hitler was trapped in his bunker in Berlin. The Nazi Empire was crumbling. But before it fell, the Nazis had time to do terrible things. They had time to murder millions of innocent people in camps like this one all across Europe. The world was only now beginning to understand how many people had died and how they had suffered.

 A young Canadian private from Saskatchewan watched the German businessman walk past the corpse piles. He had been a farmer before the war. He had never seen death like this before. None of them had. These Canadian soldiers had fought their way from the beaches of Normandy through France and Holland. They had seen their friends die in battle.

 They had seen bombed out cities and destroyed villages. But nothing had prepared them for Bergen Bellson. Nothing could prepare anyone for this. The private thought about his family back home. his mother and father on the farm, his little sister in school. They had no idea places like this existed. He barely believed it himself, even though he was standing in the middle of it.

 The smell was in his nose, his mouth, his clothes. He would smell it for the rest of his life. Every night when he tried to sleep, he would see the faces of the dead. He would remember the sounds of the dying, and he would remember these well-dressed Germans claiming they did not know.

 The Canadian officers had ordered this march. They gathered up the mayors, the council members, the business owners, the wealthy families from all the towns near the camp. They went doortodoor with a list of names. They brought these important citizens here under armed guard. Some Germans protested. They said they were not Nazis.

 They said they had nothing to do with this. The Canadian soldiers did not care about their excuses. If you lived this close to hell and did nothing, then you needed to see what your silence had allowed. One German woman in an expensive coat fainted when she saw a pile of children’s bodies. The Canadian soldiers picked her up and made her keep walking. There was more to see.

 They took the civilians past the mass graves being dug by British bulldozers. They showed them the crematorium where the Nazis had burned thousands of bodies. They walked them through every section of the camp, making sure they missed nothing. But here is the question that haunted those Canadian soldiers. The question that still matters today.

 Why did these battleh hardened men who had survived the worst fighting of World War II feel they had to force these civilians to take this horrible tour? What made young soldiers from Canada who just wanted to go home to their families decide that German towns people needed to walk past rotting corpses and dying prisoners? And the even harder question, were they right to do it? Bergen Belin was not the only place like this.

 The Nazis had built a massive network of camps across all the lands they controlled. There were over 40,000 camps and ghettos spread across Nazi occupied Europe. Some were work camps where prisoners were forced to make weapons and supplies for the German war machine. Others were concentration camps where people were locked up for being enemies of the Nazi state.

 And some, the worst ones, were death camps built for only one purpose, to kill as many people as possible as fast as possible. Bergen Belzin started in 1943 as a different kind of camp. The Nazis called it an exchange camp. They kept certain Jewish prisoners there who they thought they might trade to the Allies for German prisoners or money.

 But as the war turned against Germany, Bergenbellzin changed. When the Soviet army started pushing west in 1945, the Nazis evacuated prisoners from camps in Poland and other eastern areas. They sent thousands and thousands of sick and dying people to Bergen Belin. The camp was built for maybe 10,000 people. By early 1945, over 60,000 prisoners were crammed inside.

 There was not enough food, not enough water, not enough space to even lie down. Disease spread like wildfire. Typhus killed hundreds every single day. The camp sat near a small German town, also called Bergen. The town had clean streets and nice houses. People lived normal lives there. They went to work, sent their children to school, bought groceries at the market, and went to church on Sundays.

 Just 5 km away, people were dying by the hundreds. The town of Cella was even closer, only 3 km from the camp gates. Other towns like Soultow were nearby, too. All these towns had mayors and council members. They had business owners and factory managers. They had wealthy families who lived in big houses with servants and gardens.

 Many of these Germans actually made money from the camp. Local businesses supplied food to the Nazi guards. They provided building materials. They sold goods and services that kept the camp running. Train lines that carried prisoners passed right through these towns. The trains moved slowly through the stations. Anyone standing on the platform could see the faces pressed against the small windows.

They could see the skeletal hands reaching through the bars. They could hear the cries for water. The trains came through at all hours, day and night, week after week, month after month. The smell from Bergen Bellson reached for miles in every direction. When the wind blew the wrong way, the whole region smelled like death.

 The crematoriums burned bodies around the clock. Black smoke rose into the sky where everyone could see it. At night, the flames lit up the darkness. People in their beds could see the orange glow on the horizon. They could smell the burning. But when anyone asked what that smell was, the answer was always the same. It was a factory.

 It was burning trash. It was anything except the truth. Sometimes prisoners were marched through the towns on their way to work sites. The Germans saw these walking skeletons stumbling down their streets. They saw the Nazi guards beating anyone who fell. They saw the bodies of those who could not keep up left in ditches by the side of the road.

 Children watched from their windows. Women saw them while shopping. Men passed them on their way to work. Everyone saw. Everyone knew something terrible was happening, but it was easier to look away. It was safer to pretend they did not understand. The local officials knew the most. The mayors received reports. The police coordinated with the camp guards.

 The wealthy citizens who ran the big businesses had contracts with the Nazi administration. They signed papers. They made deals. they profited. And when the war started to go badly for Germany, when the Allied bombs started falling on German cities, these same officials and businessmen claimed they were victims, too.

 They said the Nazis forced them to cooperate. They said they had no choice. They built their wall of excuses brick by brick, preparing for the day when someone would ask what they knew and when they knew it. The Canadian soldiers coming toward Bergen Bellson in April 1945 knew nothing about any of this yet. The men of the second and third Canadian infantry divisions had been fighting since D-Day.

 They landed on Juno Beach in Normandy on June 6th, 1944. They fought their way through France. They liberated towns in Belgium and Holland. They crossed rivers under fire. They cleared the Germans from the Shelt estuary so supply ships could reach Antworp. They fought in winter cold and summer heat. They saw their friends die. They lived in muddy holes and ruined buildings. They were tired.

 They were ready for the war to end. Most of these Canadian soldiers were ordinary men before the war. They were farmers from Saskatchewan and Alberta. They were factory workers from Ontario. They were fishermen from the Maritimes. They were teachers, store clerks, mechanics, and miners.

 They joined up to fight Hitler and free Europe. They believed in their cause, but they were still just regular men who wanted to go home to their families and their normal lives. None of them were prepared for what they were about to find. You cannot prepare for something like Bergen Bellson. No amount of training or battle experience can ready a person for that level of human suffering.

 The Canadian soldiers thought they had seen the worst that war could offer. They had no idea that the worst was still ahead of them. Waiting behind the gates of a camp just a few kilometers from a town where Germans lived their comfortable lives and claimed they did not know. The Canadian soldiers walked through Bergen Bellson in a days.

 They saw the corpse piles, the dying prisoners, the children with hollow eyes. But then they noticed something that made their blood boil even more. Near the prisoner barracks stood nice houses where the Nazi guards had lived. These houses had gardens with flowers blooming. They had comfortable furniture inside. The kitchens were stocked with food.

 The guards had lived well while just a few feet away people starved to death. The contrast was so stark, so cruel that many soldiers could not process it. How could human beings live in comfort while other human beings died of hunger right next door? After seeing the camp, the Canadian soldiers went into the nearby German towns.

 They needed supplies. They needed help burying the dead and caring for the survivors. What they found in these towns made them even angrier. The streets were clean. The houses were neat and tidy. The German civilians were well-fed and healthy. They went about their daily business as if nothing unusual was happening just down the road.

 When the Canadian soldiers told them about the camp, the Germans acted shocked. They said they had no idea such a place existed. They claimed they knew nothing about it. But the Canadian soldiers were not stupid. They could smell the camp from the town. If you could smell it now, you could smell it before. The train tracks ran right through these towns.

 The smoke from the crematoriums was visible for miles. These Germans knew. They had to know. They just chose to look the other way. They chose their comfort over other people’s lives. And now they were choosing to lie about it. The anger grew among the Canadian troops. Officers heard their men talking. They saw the rage building. Something had to be done.

These comfortable Germans could not just walk away from this. They could not pretend it never happened. They needed to see what their silence had allowed. They needed to face the truth. The decision formed slowly at first, then became clear and firm. The German civilians would be brought to the camp. They would be made to walk through it.

They would see every horror and they would not be allowed to look away. The order came down from the senior Allied commanders. It was simple and direct. German civilians living near concentration camps must be brought to see what happened there. They must witness the horror. They must understand what was done in their name, in their country, just miles from their homes.

The British commanders issued the order first. Then the Canadian officers in charge of the areas around Bergen Bellson received the same instructions. Make lists of the important people in each town. The mayors, the council members, the business owners, the wealthy families, the ones who had power and influence, the ones who could have spoken up but chose silence instead.

Starting on April 17th, 1945, Canadian soldiers went door todo in the towns of Bergen, Cella, and Sulttow. They carried lists with names and addresses. They knocked on the doors of the biggest houses first, the homes with servants and gardens, the places where rich people lived comfortable lives. A Canadian lieutenant would stand at the door with several armed soldiers behind him.

 When the door opened, he would read a name from his list. You are ordered to come with us to tour the Bergen Bellson camp. Be ready in 10 minutes. Bring your wife if you are married. Wear whatever clothes you like. You will be walking. The Germans protested immediately. They said they were not Nazis. They showed their party membership cards or lack of them.

 They explained they were just ordinary citizens trying to survive the war like everyone else. Some offered money, others threatened to complain to higher authorities. The Canadian soldiers listened to none of it. The orders were clear. If your name was on the list, you were going to the camp. There were no exceptions. No excuses would be accepted.

 Over the next week, the Canadians rounded up about 2,000 civilians from the towns around Bergen Bellson. They gathered them in groups of 50 to 100 people. The Germans came dressed in their finest clothes, as if dressing well might somehow protect them from what they were about to see. Women wore fur coats and fancy hats.

 Men had on their best suits with polished leather shoes. They looked like they were going to a wedding or an important business meeting. The Canadian soldiers, dirty from days of burying bodies and caring for dying prisoners, looked at these clean, well-fed Germans with cold eyes. The march to the camp was silent. The Germans walked in lines with armed Canadian soldiers on both sides.

 Some of the civilians tried to make small talk with the soldiers. They asked where the soldiers were from. They commented on the weather. The Canadians did not respond. They just kept walking, their faces hard as stone. As the groups got closer to Bergen Bellson, the smell reached them. The Germans started covering their noses with handkerchiefs.

Some gagged. A few tried to slow down or stop. The soldiers behind them ordered them to keep moving. You wanted to live close to this and pretend it was not there. Now you are going to see exactly what it is. The gates opened. The German civilians walked through and then they saw.

 The corpse piles were right there, impossible to miss. Hundreds of naked bodies stacked like logs. The skin stretched tight over bones, faces frozen in agony. The Germans stopped walking. They stood there staring, their mouths open in shock. The Canadian soldiers gave them no time to process. Keep walking. Look at everything. Do not turn away.

 The soldiers guided them past pile after pile of the dead. They made them stop and look at each one. They pointed out details. See how thin they are. See the bullet holes in some of them. See the children in that pile over there. A German businessman started to cry. He said over and over that he did not know. A Canadian sergeant stood close to him and spoke in a low, angry voice.

 You drove past this camp every day. You smelled it. You saw the smoke. Everyone knew. You just did not care enough to look. The businessman had no answer. He just stood there with tears running down his face while death surrounded him on all sides. The soldiers took them into the barracks next.

 The living skeletons lay on wooden bunks. Some prisoners tried to sit up when the Germans came in. They wanted to see the faces of the people who let this happen. Other prisoners were too weak to move. They just stared with empty eyes. The Canadian soldiers made the German civilians walk down every aisle. They made them look into the face of every prisoner who had the strength to look back. These are your neighbors.

 These are the people who lived and died 5 kilometers from your town while you ate good food and slept in warm beds. Then came the key moment that soldiers would remember for the rest of their lives. A wealthy German woman in an expensive fur coat suddenly turned and tried to walk back toward the gates.

 She had seen enough. She could not take anymore. A Canadian sergeant stepped in front of her, blocking her path. His voice was quiet but firm as steel. You will walk every meter of this camp. You will see every body. You will look at every dying prisoner. You do not get to leave until we say you can leave. The woman protested.

 Her voice was high and scared. I did not know about this place. I am not responsible for this. I am just a wife and mother. I never hurt anyone. The sergeant did not move. He pointed back toward the barracks and the corpse piles. Then he spoke words that cut through all her excuses. You say you did not know, but everyone knew.

 The smoke, the smell, the trains full of prisoners passing through your town. You knew you just did not care to look, and that makes you responsible. The woman started crying, but the sergeant was unmoved. He gestured for her to turn around and keep walking. She would see the mass graves being dug by bulldozers. She would see the crematorium area where thousands of bodies had been burned.

 She would smell every awful smell and see every terrible sight. She would not be allowed to close her eyes or turn away. None of them would. All through the camp, similar scenes played out. Germans fainting from shock and being revived to continue the tour. Men vomiting into the dirt. Women sobbing uncontrollably.

And through it all, the Canadian soldiers stood firm. Their faces showed no pity for these civilians. They had seen too much death. They had held too many dying prisoners in their arms. They had buried too many bodies. These well-dressed Germans crying about what they saw could not compare to the suffering of the people who had lived and died in this place.

 The force tours continued for days. Group after group of German civilians walked through the gates of Bergen Bellson. The Canadians made sure the important people saw everything. Every corpse pile, every dying prisoner, every mass grave, every piece of evidence that this happened here in Germany with German people either helping or looking away.

 There would be no denying it later. There would be no claiming ignorance. Too many people had seen it now. The truth was out and it could never be hidden again. The German civilians stumbled out of Bergen Bellson in shock. Some were genuinely broken by what they had seen. Their faces were white as chalk. Their hands shook. They could not speak.

 They just walked slowly back toward their towns with their eyes staring at nothing. These Germans had seen things that would live in their nightmares forever. The smell was in their clothes and hair. The images were burned into their minds. A few of them would never be the same again.

 But many others were already building their defenses. Yes, it was horrible. Yes, it was terrible. But this was the Nazis who did this, not us. We are not responsible. We were victims of Hitler, too. He forced us to go along with his plans. What could we have done? If we spoke up, we would have been killed or put in camps ourselves.

 The excuses came quickly, too quickly, like they had been preparing these words for years, just waiting for the day when someone would ask questions. Some Germans fainted during the tours. The sight of so many dead bodies, the smell of death and disease, the moans of the dying prisoners were too much for their minds to handle.

 Women collapsed in their fancy dresses. Men fell to their knees in the mud. The Canadian soldiers picked them up and made them keep walking. There was no sympathy, no mercy. If you fainted, you woke up and continued the tour. you would see everything whether you wanted to or not. A few Germans accepted what they saw and understood their part in it.

 These were rare but they existed. One older man, a teacher from Tela, stood in front of a pile of children’s bodies and wept openly. He said nothing. He made no excuses. He just cried. Later, he would tell a Canadian officer that he had failed as a human being. He had heard rumors about the camps for years. He chose not to investigate.

 He chose comfort over truth. And now children were dead because people like him did nothing. But he was the exception. Most Germans left the camp still defending themselves. They were angry at the Canadian soldiers for forcing them to see such things. They complained that this was cruel treatment of civilians. Some even threatened to report the Canadians to hire authorities for making them walk through the camp.

 The irony was lost on them. They stood in a place where thousands had been murdered and complained about having to look at it. The Canadian commanders were not done with the German civilians yet. After the force tours, new orders came. The Germans would help clean up the camp. They would help bury the dead. They would bring food and supplies for the survivors.

If you lived near this place and did nothing while it operated, then you would work to fix what you allowed to happen. German men were given shovels and ordered to dig graves. Women were told to bring blankets and food from their homes. Business owners had to provide whatever resources the camp needed.

 The German men dug in the cold ground, their fancy suits getting covered in dirt. They lifted bodies that weighed almost nothing and placed them in mass graves. Some cried while they worked. Others worked in grim silence. A few still muttered that this was not fair, that they should not have to do this. The Canadian soldiers supervising them had no patience for complaints.

 You will dig until every body is buried. You will work until we tell you to stop. German women brought supplies from their homes. They carried blankets, sheets, and clothing to the barracks where survivors lived. Some of these women tried to help the prisoners directly. They offered food or water with shaking hands.

 The prisoners looked at them with hard eyes. Where was this kindness before? Where was this help when we were dying? A few prisoners accepted what was offered. Others turned away. They wanted nothing from Germans, even Germans who claimed they were sorry. Now, the Canadian soldiers watched all of this with mixed feelings. Private Gordon Brown from the Second Division wrote in a letter home about making German civilians see the camp.

 He said he wanted them to smell what we smelled and see what we saw. Maybe then they would stop lying about not knowing. He felt no guilt about forcing them to witness the horror. They needed to see it. They needed to understand what their silence had allowed. Lieutenant James Macdonald had similar thoughts.

 He looked at the well-fed Germans in their clean homes and thought about how they lived just 5 kilometers from hell. He watched them cry at the camp and felt no sympathy. They were crying about having to look at death for a few hours. The prisoners had lived with it for years. The lieutenant wrote in his diary that some Germans seemed truly horrified, but most were just sorry they got caught knowing.

 They were sad for themselves, not for the dead. Sergeant William Thompson was more direct. He said some Germans were genuinely shocked by what they saw. Their horror seemed real. But most of them, in his view, were just putting on a show. They cried because it looked good. They acted upset because that is what people expected.

 But deep down they were the same people who turned their backs on screaming prisoners being marched through their streets. Thompson did not believe their tears. He thought they were crying because they got caught, not because they cared. The prisoners in the camp had their own reactions to seeing Germans forced to witness what happened.

 Some felt a grim satisfaction. Finally, these comfortable people had to face reality. Finally, they could not look away. A few prisoners who still had strength stood at the windows of the barracks and watched the German civilians walk past the corpse piles. They wanted to see the horror on German faces.

 They wanted Germans to feel even a tiny piece of the fear and pain that prisoners had felt for years. Other prisoners were too broken to care. What did it matter if Germans saw the camp now? The dead were still dead. The suffering had still happened. Making Germans look at bodies would not bring anyone back to life. It would not heal the damage done to minds and bodies.

These prisoners just wanted to survive another day. They had no energy left for caring about German guilt or German education. One prisoner, a Polish Jewish woman, told a Canadian nurse that she was glad the Germans were being forced to see. She said for years the Germans pretended prisoners were not human.

 They looked through us like we were ghosts. Now they had to see us. They had to admit we existed. They had to know we had names and families and lives before this. Whether it would change anything, she did not know. But at least they could not say they never saw. Allied photographers documented everything. They captured the expressions of shock and disgust on German faces, the tears and fainting, the Germans covering their noses.

 These images would be published in newspapers around the world. This happened. Germans saw it. No one could deny it. Now, the forced tours at Bergen Bellson continued for over a week. Thousands of German civilians walked through the gates. They saw the horror. They smelled the death. And then they went back to their towns, back to their lives, carrying with them images they would never forget.

 Whether those images changed them, whether they truly understood their responsibility, whether they felt real guilt or just shame at being caught, that remained to be seen. But one thing was certain. They could never again say they did not know. Hey, pause here. If you’ve made it this far into the video, you’re exactly the kind of person I make these for.

 Thank you for being here. If you’re not subscribed yet, I’d be honored to have you. We’re building something special, a place where Canadian sacrifice is remembered. Subscribe and be part of it. All right, where were we? The forced tours of German civilians through Bergen Bellson set a pattern that spread across all of occupied Germany.

 By May 1945, when the war in Europe finally ended, Allied commanders had forced an estimated 50,000 German civilians to walk through liberated concentration camps. It became standard practice. When American troops found a camp, they rounded up nearby Germans and made them see it. When British forces liberated a camp, local civilians took the same horrible tour.

The Canadians, the Americans, the British all agreed on this policy. Germans would not be allowed to claim ignorance about what happened in their country. The practice became part of a larger plan called denazification. The Allied leaders knew that defeating Germany in battle was not enough. They had to defeat the Nazi ideas, too.

 They had to make German people understand what their government had done. They had to break down the wall of lies and denial that the Nazis had built. Making civilians walk through concentration camps was one tool in this larger effort. It was brutal. It was harsh. But the Allied commanders believed it was necessary.

 Film crews and photographers documented everything. They filmed German civilians walking past corpse piles. They recorded the shocked faces, the tears, the fainting, the vomiting. This footage was not just for historical records. The Allied forces took this film and showed it in German movie theaters. After the war ended, Germans who wanted to see a movie had to first watch news reels about the concentration camps. They could not avoid it.

 They could not look away. The evidence was everywhere, impossible to ignore. Newspapers around the world published the photographs. People in America, Britain, Canada, and other allied countries saw images of well-dressed Germans being forced through the camps. The public reaction was strong support for the policy.

 Most people felt that Germans needed to face what they had allowed. If anything, many thought the forced tours were not harsh enough punishment. The camps showed evil on a scale that was hard to believe. Making Germans look at it seemed like the very least that should happen. But there were some critics.

 A few voices said it was wrong to force civilians to see such horrible things. They argued that not all Germans supported the Nazis. Some Germans had been victims, too. Was it fair to traumatize people who might have been against Hitler all along? These critics said the force tours were collective punishment, making all Germans pay for what some Germans did.

The debate about collective guilt versus individual responsibility started immediately and has never fully been resolved. The survivors of the camps generally supported the force tours. When asked what they thought about Germans being made to walk through Bergen Bellson or Daau or Bukinvald, most survivors said it was right.

 They should see. They should know. They should understand what was done to us. Some survivors wanted even harsher punishment for the German people. Others just wanted Germans to acknowledge the truth. They wanted to hear Germans say out loud that this happened, that it was real, that millions of people suffered and died.

The forced tours had a powerful effect on the dennazification process. Allied forces were trying to identify and remove Nazis from positions of power in Germany. They were trying to change German society from the ground up. Part of this meant forcing Germans to confront reality. The tours created an undeniable visual record.

 Germans could not claim they never knew about the camps when thousands of their neighbors had walked through them. The photographs and films prevented future denial. This happened. We have proof. We have witnesses. The policy also changed how the world thought about war crimes and accountability. Before World War II, the idea that an entire population could be held responsible for their government’s actions was not common.

 But the Holocaust was different. It was so massive, so organized that it required the cooperation or at least the silence of millions of people. The forced tours represented a new approach. If your country commits terrible crimes and you do nothing to stop it, then you share some responsibility. You will be made to face what your inaction allowed.

 The German reaction to all of this was mixed and complicated. In surveys done in 1946, over 90% of Germans claimed they had secretly opposed the Nazis. Almost everyone said they never supported Hitler. They were all just following orders or staying quiet to protect their families. The numbers made no sense.

 If 90% of Germans opposed the Nazis, how did the Nazis control Germany for 12 years? How did they start a world war and murder millions? The math did not add up. Germans were rewriting their own history even as the concentration camp films played in their theaters. But the forced tours and the constant exposure to evidence did have some effect.

 It was harder for Germans to deny the Holocaust when they had seen Bergen Bellson with their own eyes. It was harder to claim ignorance when photographs showed them walking past corpse piles. The visual record created a foundation for German society to eventually reckon with its past. This process took decades and is still ongoing.

 But it started with those forced marches through the camps in April and May of 1945. The international community watched how the allies handled post-war Germany. The forced tours became a model, however imperfect, for how to make populations face their country’s crimes. When other genocides and mass atrocities happened in later decades, people remembered Bergen Bellson.

 They remembered that sometimes you have to force people to look at uncomfortable truths. Sometimes you cannot let people look away. The morale impact on Allied soldiers was significant too. The men who liberated the camps carried the trauma for the rest of their lives. But many of them also felt that forcing Germans to see the camps gave their suffering some meaning.

 They had witnessed the worst of humanity. By making Germans witness it too, they were fighting against future denial. They were creating a record that could never be erased. This gave some soldiers a sense of purpose in their pain. For the German people, the forced tours were the beginning of a long and difficult process.

 Some Germans truly confronted their guilt. They understood that their silence had consequences. They worked to build a different Germany, one that would never allow such evil again. But many Germans remained defensive. They saw themselves as victims of Nazi propaganda. They claimed they were powerless to resist. They spent decades minimizing their role and responsibility.

 The evidence from the forced tours made it impossible to deny that the Holocaust happened. Thousands of Germans had seen the camps. Millions had seen the photographs and films. The Allies had created an overwhelming record of evidence. This mattered tremendously. In the years after the war, some people tried to claim the Holocaust was exaggerated or made up.

But the visual record from 1945 stopped those lies from taking hold. Too many people had seen the truth with their own eyes. The practice of forcing civilians through concentration camps lasted only a few weeks in spring 1945, but its effects lasted generations. It changed how the world thought about accountability.

It created a visual record that prevented denial. It forced at least some Germans to face what happened in their country. And it gave survivors some small measure of acknowledgement. The world was saying, “We see what was done to you. We will not let it be forgotten. We will make sure even those who looked away must now look and see.

The wider impact of those forced tours in April and May 1945 echoes through history to this day. Every time someone says never again, they are drawing on the lessons learned when Canadian soldiers made German civilians walk through Bergen Bellson. Every time we demand accountability for war crimes, we are following a path that started with those painful marches past the corpse piles.

 The decision to force Germans to witness what they allowed was harsh. It was traumatic, but it was also necessary. Without it, the truth might have been buried along with the bodies. Among the thousands of German civilians forced through Bergen Bellson, a few stories stand out. They show the different ways people reacted to confronting such terrible truth.

 Some were changed forever. Others built even higher walls around their guilt. Hair Schmidt was a business owner in the town of Bergen. He ran a successful shop that sold supplies to local factories. When Canadian soldiers came to his door on April 18th, 1945, he protested loudly. He was not a Nazi.

 He never joined the party. He was just a businessman trying to feed his family during difficult times. The soldiers did not care about his protests. They marched him to the camp along with about 60 other important citizens from Bergen. At first, Harsh Schmidt covered his eyes when he saw the corpse piles. A Canadian sergeant pulled his hands away from his face. You will look.

 You will see everything. Schmidt walked through the entire camp in a state of shock. When he returned home that evening, his wife said he looked like a ghost. He did not speak for 3 days. He just sat in his chair staring at nothing. But unlike many Germans, Harsh Schmidt did not build walls of excuses. Instead, something broke open inside him.

He realized that he had chosen not to see what was happening. The smoke, the smell, the trains full of prisoners. He had noticed all of it and told himself it was not his business. In the years after the war, Schmidt dedicated himself to helping Jewish survivors. He gave money. He volunteered his time.

 He spoke publicly about his shame and his failure as a human being. Before he died in 1967, he gave testimony that became part of Holocaust education materials. His words were simple and devastating. I chose not to see. That is my eternal shame. Fra Elizabeth Weber had a very different reaction. She was a wealthy woman from Cella, a socialite who hosted parties and wore expensive clothes.

 She lived in a large house just three kilometers from Bergen Bellson. Canadian soldiers brought her to the camp on April 20th, 1945. She wore her finest fur coat as if nice clothing might protect her from what she was about to witness. Fra Weber fainted twice during the tour. Each time the soldiers revived her and made her continue.

 When she got home, she wrote in her diary. The entry from that night was found years later by historians. She wrote about the smell that she now realized had always been there. We smelled it in our town. We smelled it in our gardens. We just called it something else. We said it was a factory or burning trash.

 We knew what it really was. We just did not want to admit it. But that diary entry was the only time Fraveber ever acknowledged the truth. She never spoke about Bergen Bellson again. When people asked her about the war years, she said she did not remember much. She claimed to have been sick during that time. She built a wall of silence around her guilt and never let anyone break through it.

 She died in 1973 without ever publicly admitting what she had seen or what it meant. The Canadian soldiers carried their own heavy burdens. Private Robert McKenzie was a 22-year-old farm boy from Saskatchewan. He had joined the army to fight for freedom and justice. He believed in the cause, but nothing prepared him for Bergen Bellson.

 He was one of the soldiers who guarded German civilians during their forced tours. He watched them cry and vomit and faint, and he felt nothing but anger. In a letter to his mother, McKenzie wrote about making a German mayor carry the body of a dead child to a mass grave. The mayor cried the whole time.

 McKenzie watched him cry and felt no sympathy. He asked his mother a question that haunted him. Does that make me hard? Does that make me a bad person? He had lost his compassion for Germans. He could not find it in himself to feel sorry for them even when they were clearly suffering from what they saw. McKenzie returned to Canada after the war and went back to farming.

 But he was never the same. He had nightmares about the camp for the rest of his life. He died in 1982 and at his funeral, his son found the letters he had written home from Germany. Reading them, his family finally understood why their father had been so quiet and sad for so many years. Captain Thomas Harvey from Montreal was a school teacher before the war.

 He was put in charge of organizing the civilian tours in his sector. He kept detailed records of everything. On April 19th, 1945, he wrote in his log that he brought 73 civilians through the camp. Most claimed to be shocked. Few seemed to understand their own part in what happened. Harvey was frustrated by their refusal to accept responsibility.

After the war, Harvey wrote a book about his experiences. He described the forced tours and explained why he thought they were necessary. He wrote that the soldiers were not being cruel by making Germans see the camps. They were being truthful. Someone had to make sure the evidence was not hidden or denied.

 Harvey believed that confronting Germans with the truth was an act of faith in humanity. He was saying in effect that he believed Germans could become better than what they had been. Whether they actually became better was up to them. The survivors of Bergen Bellson had their own complex feelings about watching Germans tour the camp.

 Rachel Goldstein was a Polish Jewish woman who weighed only 71 lb when the camp was liberated. She was so weak she could barely sit up, but she watched from her barracks window as German civilians were marched past the corpse piles. Rachel wanted the Germans to see the prisoners as human beings. She wanted them to understand that every dead body had been a person with a name, a family, a life before the Nazis destroyed everything.

 Some of the German civilians looked at the survivors. Most could not meet their eyes. Rachel felt a mixture of satisfaction and deep sadness. They were finally being forced to see. But why did it take liberation and armed guards to make them look? Isaac Levy was 15 years old when Bergen Bellson was liberated. He was Hungarian and had survived by pure luck.

 He remembered a Canadian soldier pointing at him while talking to a group of German women. The soldier said, “Look at this child. You say you did not know this was happening. Look at him. How could you not know?” One of the women started crying. Isaac felt nothing for her tears. She was crying for herself, not for him.

 Not all Germans were changed by what they saw. Many remained defensive and unrepentant. One official from Bergen was forced through the camp and showed almost no emotion during the entire tour. Later, when questioned by Allied investigators, he still blamed everything on the Nazis. He claimed he was just a civil servant doing his job.

He said he had no power to stop what was happening. He built excuse after excuse, a wall of words designed to protect him from his own guilt. He never admitted responsibility. He never said he should have done something different. He was an example of the Germans who saw the horror but refused to let it change them.

 These individual stories both of transformation and denial show the complicated truth about the forced tours. Some people confronted their guilt and tried to do better. Others saw the same things and learned nothing. The Canadian soldiers created the opportunity for Germans to face the truth.

 But they could not force Germans to accept it. That choice belonged to each person who walked through those gates. The story of Canadian soldiers forcing German civilians through Bergen Bellson became part of history, but it was remembered differently in different places. In Germany, the forced tours were barely discussed for many decades after the war.

 It was an uncomfortable memory that did not fit the story Germans wanted to tell about themselves. They preferred to talk about how they rebuilt their country from the ruins. They spoke about democracy and peace. But the image of well-dressed Germans walking past corpse piles while Canadian soldiers watched was not a story they wanted to remember.

 Slowly over the years, Germany began to change how it talked about the past. By the 1970s and 1980s, younger Germans started asking harder questions. They wanted to know what their parents and grandparents did during the Nazi years. They wanted the truth, not comfortable lies. The forced tours through concentration camps became part of this difficult conversation.

Today, German students learn about Bergen Bellson and the other camps. They learned that German civilians claimed not to know what was happening. They learned that Allied soldiers made those civilians face the truth. It is taught as a lesson about the danger of looking away, about the responsibility that comes with living in a society where evil things happen.

 The Bergen Bellson Memorial stands today on the site of the former camp. The barracks are gone now. The Allies burned them after liberation to stop the spread of disease, but the mass graves remain, marked by simple stones. The memorial includes documentation about the liberation, including photographs of German civilians being forced through the camp.

Visitors can see those images and understand what happened in April 1945. The memorial does not hide this part of the story. It presents it as an important moment in the process of making Germany confront its crimes. In Canada, the story of Bergen Bellson liberation is less wellknown than it should be.

 When people think about Canadian contributions to World War II, they usually remember D-Day or the liberation of Holland. The concentration camp liberations, including the forced civilian tours, are not as famous. But Canadian veterans who were there never forgot. Many of them struggled for decades with what they saw. Some spoke publicly about their experiences.

Others kept silent. The memories too painful to share even with their own families. The Canadian War Museum in Ottawa preserves testimonies from soldiers who liberated Bergen Bellson. Their recorded interviews tell the story of what they found and what they did about it. These veterans, when asked if they had any regrets about forcing Germans to see the camp, almost always said no. They believed it was necessary.

They believed Germans needed to confront the truth. Even decades later, with time to reflect and soften, these men stood by their decision. What they saw at Bergen Bellson was so terrible that they felt no guilt about making others witness it too. Around the world, the forced tours became an important part of how people understood accountability after war crimes.

The images of German civilians at Bergen Bellson were published everywhere. They became symbols of a larger truth that ordinary people who live comfortable lives while evil happens nearby cannot claim innocence. The tours set a precedent. When genocides and mass atrocities happened in later years in places like Cambodia and Rwanda and Bosnia, people remembered Bergen Bellson.

 They remembered that sometimes populations need to be confronted with what was done in their name. The practice influenced how the world thinks about transitional justice. This is the term for how societies deal with past crimes when moving from dictatorship to democracy or from war to peace. Making people face uncomfortable truths became recognized as an important part of this process.

 You cannot move forward by pretending the past did not happen. You cannot build a better future on a foundation of lies. The forced tours, harsh as they were, represented this principle in action. The relationship between Canada and Germany after the war was shaped partly by these events. Canada participated in the occupation of Germany and in the dennazification process.

 The forced tours were part of that. Over time, Germany and Canada built a strong friendship based on shared democratic values. But that friendship was only possible because Germany eventually confronted its past. The process started in April 1945 when Canadian soldiers made German civilians walk through Bergen Bellson.

 It took decades to complete and in some ways it is still ongoing. The survivors of Bergen Bellson and their descendants carry their own legacy. Many survivors spent their whole lives telling their stories, making sure the world would not forget what happened. Some survivors spoke specifically about the day German civilians were forced through the camp.

They remembered it as a moment of recognition, of being seen as human again. After years of being treated as less than human, their children and grandchildren continue to tell these stories today. They speak at schools and museums. They write books and give interviews. They make sure that even as the last survivors die, the memory stays alive.

 For the Canadian soldiers and their families, the legacy is more complicated. Many veterans came home changed by what they saw. They had nightmares. They struggled with anger and sadness. Some turned to alcohol to numb the pain. Others threw themselves into their work, trying to forget. But as they got older, many felt a need to talk about what they experienced.

 They wanted younger generations to understand what happened and why it mattered. Private Robert McKenzie, the Saskatchewan farm boy who helped guard German civilians during the tours, lived until 1982. When he was 62 years old, a historian interviewed him about his war experiences. McKenzie was asked directly whether he thought the forced tours were the right thing to do.

 His answer became one of the most powerful statements about that day. McKenzie said that people often asked if the soldiers were too harsh in making German civilians walk through the camp. His response was to ask a question back. Was it harsher than what happened to the people who died there? He explained that the soldiers did not make Germans see the camp because they were cruel.

 They did it because they were kind. Kind enough to believe that Germans could be better than what they had allowed. Whether they became better, McKenzie said that was up to them. The deeper meaning of those forced tours in April 1945 goes beyond revenge or punishment. It was about truth. It was about refusing to let people hide from reality.

 The Canadian soldiers who liberated Bergen Bellson saw humanity at its absolute worst. They saw evil on a scale that most people cannot imagine. And they understood something important. If they let people deny what happened, if they let the comfortable Germans in their clean towns pretend they never knew, then history could be rewritten.

The dead could be forgotten and it could all happen again. By forcing Germans to walk through the gates, to smell the death, to see the corpses and the dying prisoners, the soldiers created an undeniable record. Too many witnesses, too many photographs, too much evidence. Denial became impossible.

 This was their gift to the future. Bought with their own trauma and pain. They carried the weight of what they saw so that the truth would survive. The lesson echoes across the decades. It speaks to anyone who lives in comfort while injustice happens nearby. It asks a hard question. What is your responsibility when you can smell the smoke? When you can see the signs, when you know something terrible is happening, but you choose not to look.

 The Germans of Bergen and Cella and Sulttow chose not to look. And when they were finally forced to see, some of them were changed, but many were not. They saw and still refused to accept their part in it. The final image that captures this whole story takes us back to April 17th, 1945. A line of well-dressed German civilians walks slowly past piles of human remains.

 Canadian soldiers in dirty uniforms stand watch. Their young faces hard and grim. The soldiers make sure every German eye stays open. They make sure every witness truly witnesses. This is not about vengeance. It is about accountability. This is not about hatred. It is about truth. The hardest kind of liberation. liberating people from their own lies, from their own willful blindness, from their own comfortable denial.

 The Germans walked through those gates and saw hell. Some of them learned, some of them changed. Some of them spent the rest of their lives trying to be better. But others saw and still refused to understand. They built new lies to protect themselves from the truth. And that choice between facing the truth and hiding from it is the choice that defines us all.

 The Canadian soldiers at Bergen Bellson understood this. They gave the Germans a chance to choose truth. What the Germans did with that chance was up to them. What we do with the lesson today is up to