Hello, this is the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me, Josephine

McDermott. Today we're going back to World War II, when the BBC's Richard Dimbleby was

the first reporter to go into the liberated Behrgen Belson concentration camp. His son,

the broadcaster Jonathan Dimbleby, recalls how his father's harrowing radio report was

for many listeners around the world, the first they had heard of the full extent of the atrocities

committed by the Nazis, the details are distressing. It's April 1945, and after five years of war

across Europe, the moment people had barely dared to dream about his happening, allied troops have

entered Berlin. In a matter of weeks, Germany will surrender. Richard Dimbleby is travelling with

the British army in northern Germany. I have just returned from the Behrgen concentration camp,

where for two hours I drove slowly about the place in a jeep, with the chief doctor of Second Army.

I had waited a day before going to the camp, so that I could be absolutely sure of the facts now

available. I find it hard to describe adequately the horrible things that I've seen and heard,

but here unadorned are the facts. No one had any idea what they were going to experience as they

went through those gates. His opening words when he made his report was, I entered the gates

and walked into the world of a nightmare, and so it was. There are 40,000 men, women and children

in the camp. German and half a dozen other nationalities, thousands of them Jews. Of this total of

40,000, 4,250, are a cutely ill, or dying of virulent disease. Typhus, typhoid, diphtheria,

dysentery, pneumonia, and childbirth fever are rife. 25,600, three quarters of them women,

are either ill from lack of food or are actually dying of starvation. In the last few months alone,

30,000 prisoners have been killed off or allowed to die. Those are the simple,

horrible facts of Belgium, but horrible as they are, they can convey little or nothing in themselves.

I wish with all my heart that everyone fighting in this war and above all those whose duty it is

...