Dirk Bogarde and his Experiences in Bergen-Belsen and his Wartime Service

Dirk Bogarde, whose real name was Derek Jules Gaspard Ulric Niven van den Bogaerde, was serving as a captain in the British Army at the time of Bergen-Belsen’s liberation. While his primary duties were not directly related to the camp’s liberation, Bogarde arrived at Bergen-Belsen shortly after its discovery. His experience there left an indelible mark on his psyche, and he would later describe the horrors he witnessed in rare and carefully chosen words.

Though Bogarde was not among the first to enter the camp, his accounts are harrowing. He recalled the overwhelming stench of death and the sight of the emaciated, skeletal figures that remained. In later years, he was hesitant to speak in detail about his experience, only occasionally alluding to the overwhelming scale of human suffering. His time at Bergen-Belsen was something he struggled to process throughout his life, describing it as an experience that “redefined humanity.”

As Bogarde wrote in The Daily Telegraph in 1988, someone in the unit to which he was attached as an intelligence officer – he spent much of his time analysing and interpreting reconnaissance photographs – said the Germans had abandoned a large concentration camp "and we ought to 'swan off ' and have a look." He hoped to find a pair of service-issue boots, which were better made in Germany, and had little suspicion of what lay ahead.

"I had known for some time that the camps existed – we saw them on our aerial photographs often enough – but it didn’t really occur to me that through the greening larches and under a clear, hard, blue sky, the last traces of the snow melting in the woods, I would be entering a hell which I should never forget and about which, for many years, I would be unable to speak."

One particularly haunting image he recounted was of prisoners still clinging to life, lying amongst the dead, too weak to move. He remembered handing cigarettes to survivors, only to watch them fall into unconsciousness, unable to smoke them. The sheer helplessness of the situation – the inability to offer comfort to those beyond hope – affected Bogarde deeply.

The Immediate Aftermath of Liberation

The British Army’s priority upon liberating Bergen-Belsen was to contain the rampant spread of disease and provide relief to the survivors. They restored the camp’s water supply and brought in food, though the prisoners’ starved bodies often could not handle the intake, leading to further deaths. Medical personnel, both military and civilian, arrived to provide treatment, but many prisoners were too far gone to be saved. Tragically, an estimated 14,000 people died shortly after liberation due to the extreme conditions they had endured.

Dirk Bogarde’s Wider Experiences During the War

Born in 1921, Dirk Bogarde came from a well-educated family and, like many young men of his generation, was swept into the war. He enlisted in 1939, joining the Queen’s Royal Regiment before transferring to the Intelligence Corps. His work as an intelligence officer placed him in several critical operations, particularly in the final stages of the war.

During the Allied advance across Europe, Bogarde’s unit was responsible for scouting ahead, locating enemy positions, and reporting back to the advancing forces. This role brought him into close contact with the aftermath of many battles and skirmishes, providing him with a front-row seat to the war’s brutal realities.

As an intelligence officer, Bogarde was also involved in sensitive operations. His duties included interrogating captured German soldiers and gathering information that could be useful for the advancing British forces. Bogarde spoke fluent French, which made him an asset in communications and translation in the European theatre of war. He had a sharp mind and strong analytical skills, qualities that made him a trusted officer.

While Bogarde’s experiences at Bergen-Belsen stand out for their emotional and psychological toll, his wider wartime service also shaped him in profound ways. He was stationed in various parts of Europe and witnessed both the strategic and human aspects of the conflict. He had several narrow escapes, including a near-death experience in Italy, which added to his growing awareness of the fragility of life. He would later describe the war as a time when he was forced to confront the darkest aspects of human nature.

Bogarde told interviewer Russell Harty it was like looking into Dante’s Inferno and spoke of the "mountains of dead people", recalling: "I can't really describe it very well, I don't really want to. I went through some of the huts and there were tiers and tiers of rotting people, but some of them were alive underneath the rot and were lifting their heads and trying… trying to do the victory thing. That was the worst."

He admitted in the same televised interview that what he saw there had changed him forever: "After the war I always knew that nothing, nothing, could ever be as bad… nothing could frighten me anymore. I mean, no man could frighten me anymore, no director... Nothing could be as bad as the war or the things I saw in the war."

He later wrote in one of his autobiographies: "At 24, the age I was then, deep shock stays registered forever.

An internal tattooing which is removable only by surgery, it cannot be conveniently sponged away by time."

There has been debate surrounding his wartime experiences, as some of the accounts in four of his volumes of autobiography and in private correspondence appear contradictory.

Critic John Carey claimed in The Times analysis of Bogarde’s “wildly camp, funny and despondent, tactful and defamatory, petulant and generous” letters that "It is virtually impossible that he (Bogarde) saw Belsen or any other camp. Things he overheard or read seem to have entered his imagination and been mistaken for lived experience."

In his best-selling authorised biography of Bogarde, published after his death, John Coldstream notes that Bogarde would have been extremely busy at that time with his job interpreting photographs taken by 39 Reconnaissance Wing of the Royal Canadian Air Force: “A considerable task it was, too, even at that late stage in the war: the total number of pictures processed in April 1945 by No 5 Mobile Field Photographic Section – one of two such teams operating with the Canadians – was a staggering 348,306.”

Robin Dashwood, reviewing Coldstream’s book in the Times Educational Supplement, suggested that “the Rank matinee idol turned European art cinema darling turned best-selling author literally invented his own life, telling different people different facts about himself and often retreating behind the shield of fiction.”

Coldstream writes on the extensive website set up by Bogarde's estate, dirkbogarde.co.uk, that "some of my interviewees said that received imagery was so vivid that soldiers serving in the vicinity became convinced that they had seen events for themselves. If Bogarde was experiencing what is now termed ‘false memory syndrome’, he had ample justification."

However, since the biography's publication in 2004, no one serving with Bogarde has come forward to either confirm or refute his account to Coldstream. Evidence places 39 Wing about an hour away from the camp at the time of its liberation, and there were floods of visitors in the initial days afterwards, so it’s extremely likely that he was there.

In Bogarde's own words -

"I think it was on the 13th of April—I'm not quite sure what the date was" (it was the 15th) "—in '44" ( the camp was liberated on the 15th April 1945, and it was the 20th April 1945 when Bogarde made his visit) "when we opened up Belsen Camp, which was the first concentration camp any of us had seen, we didn't even know what they were, we'd heard vague rumours that they were. I mean nothing could be worse than that. The gates were opened and then I realised that I was looking at Dante's Inferno, I mean ... I ... I still haven't seen anything as dreadful. And never will. And a girl came up who spoke English, because she recognised one of the badges, and she ... her breasts were like, sort of, empty purses, she had no top on, and a pair of man's pyjamas, you know, the prison pyjamas, and no hair. But I knew she was girl because of her breasts, which were empty. She was I suppose, oh I don't know, twenty four, twenty five, and we talked, and she was, you know, so excited and thrilled, and all around us there were mountains of dead people, I mean mountains of them, and they were slushy, and they were slimy, so when you walked through them ... or walked—you tried not to, but it was like .... well you just walked through them, and she ... there was a very nice British MP, and he said 'Don't have any more, come away, come away sir, if you don't mind, because they've all got typhoid and you'll get it, you shouldn't be here swanning around' and she saw in the back of the jeep, the unexpired portion of the daily ration, wrapped in a piece of the Daily Mirror, and she said could she have it, and he" [the Military Police] "said 'Don't give her food, because they eat it immediately and they die, within ten minutes', but she didn't want the food, she wanted the piece of Daily Mirror—she hadn't seen newsprint for about eight years or five years, whatever it was she had been in the camp for. ... she was Estonian. ... that's all she wanted. She gave me a big kiss, which was very moving. The corporal" [Military Police] "was out of his mind and I was just dragged off. I never saw her again, of course she died. I mean, I gather they all did. But, I can't really describe it very well, I don't really want to. I went through some of the huts and there were tiers and tiers of rotting people, but some of them who were alive underneath the rot, and were lifting their heads and trying .... trying to do the victory thing. That was the worst."

"After the war, I always knew that nothing, nothing, could ever be as bad ... but nothing could frighten me any more, I mean, no man could frighten me any more, no director ... nothing could be as bad as the war, or the things I saw in the war."

The horror and revulsion at the cruelty and inhumanity that he witnessed still left him with a deep-seated hostility towards Germany; in the late 1980s, he wrote that he would disembark from a lift rather than ride with a German of his generation. Nevertheless, three of his more memorable film roles were as Germans, one of them as a former SS officer in The Night Porter (1974).

Bogarde was most vocal towards the end of his life on voluntary euthanasia, of which he became a staunch proponent after witnessing the protracted death of his lifelong partner and manager Anthony Forwood in 1988. He gave an interview to John Hofsess, London executive director of the Voluntary Euthanasia Society:

"My views were formulated as a 24-year-old officer in Normandy ... On one occasion, the jeep ahead hit a mine ... Next thing I knew, there was this chap in the long grass beside me. A bloody bundle, shrapnel-ripped, legless, one arm only. The one arm reached out to me, white eyeballs wide, unseeing, in the bloody mask that had been a face. A gurgling voice said, "Help. Kill me." With shaking hands I reached for my small pouch to load my revolver ... I had to look for my bullets—by which time somebody else had already taken care of him. I heard the shot. I still remember that gurgling sound. A voice pleading for death ....

During the war, I saw more wounded men being "taken care of" than I saw being rescued. Because sometimes you were too far from a dressing station, sometimes you couldn't get them out. And they were pumping blood or whatever; they were in such a wreck, the only thing to do was to shoot them. And they were, so don't think they weren't. That hardens you: You get used to the fact that it can happen, and that it is the only sensible thing to do."

Legacy of Wartime Experience

Dirk Bogarde’s time in the army, particularly his experiences at Bergen-Belsen, left a lasting legacy. While he went on to become a beloved figure in British cinema, his wartime service provided him with a unique understanding of life’s fragility and the depths of human suffering. It informed his work both on and off-screen, as he brought a sense of gravitas and introspection to his acting roles and his later writings.

Though he chose not to dwell publicly on his time at Belsen, the few glimpses he gave into his memories of the camp serve as a sobering reminder of the horrors of war and the unimaginable cruelty endured by so many during the Holocaust. Dirk Bogarde, like so many of his generation, carried the burden of these memories for the rest of his life, quietly reflecting on the darkness of the past while contributing to a post-war world in his own way.

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