End to fighting revealed horrors of Nazi concentration camps hidden behind the front lines

WHILE millions rejoiced across a devastated Europe as the guns finally fell silent on VE Day, British paratrooper Peter Belcher was witnessing the worst of Nazi Germany at a concentration camp.

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Mr Belcher, originally from Devizes, Wiltshire, was already a veteran of the D-Day landings and the Battle of the Bulge, but the worst was yet to come.

Decorated six times, after fighting his way across France, for which he received the Legion d’Honneur, by May 1945, his unit was stationed near the Baltic coast, meeting Russian troops advancing from the east. Two days later Germany surrendered but there was no great celebration for Corporal Belcher and his unit.

Near them was a rail line running into woodland, used by one of the hundreds of concentration camps the Nazi regime had set up.

Mr Belcher, now aged 101, and who served with the 2nd Battalion Oxfordshire & Buckinghamshire Light Infantry, part of the 6th Airborne Division, said: "We actually... with the padre, went to a nearby concentration camp and there were two survivors still in there.