British troops have entered the German concentration camp of Bergen-Belsen.

Inside the camp the horrified soldiers found piles of dead and rotting corpses and thousands of sick and starving prisoners kept in severely overcrowded and dirty compounds.

Belsen, near Hanover in Germany, is the first concentration camp to be liberated by the British. Details of the conditions inside are likely to horrify a public which until now has only heard limited descriptions from the camps in Poland freed by the Red Army.

The first British soldiers who entered Bergen-Belsen have described seeing a huge pile of dead, naked women's bodies within full view of several hundred children held at the camp.

From where we were, we could see the desperate plight of the inmates People's War memories »

The gutters, too, were filled with dead bodies.

One of the reasons the Germans agreed to surrender Belsen was because so many of the inmates were diseased. There was no running water in the camp and there were epidemics of typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis.

There were thousands of sick women, who should have been in hospital, lying on hard, bare bug-ridden boards. Of the 1,704 acute typhus, typhoid and tuberculosis cases, only 474 women had bunks to sleep on.

There were fewer male prisoners, but they were also kept in severely overcrowded and dirty conditions.

One of the British senior medical officers, Brigadier Llewellyn Glyn- Hughes, told the Reuters news agency he saw evidence of cannibalism in the camp. There were bodies with no flesh on them and the liver, kidneys and heart removed.

He said their first priority was to remove the dead bodies from the camp. He was told some 30,000 people had died in the past few months.

He said typhus had caused far fewer deaths than starvation. Men and women had tried to keep themselves clean with dregs from coffee cups. Medical supplies were severely limited - there were no vaccines, or drugs and no treatments for lice.

The only food available for the prisoners was turnip soup and British guards had to fire over the heads of prisoners to restore order among those desperate to get at the food stores.

Those prisoners who were too weak to get up and collect their food went without and died.

The camp commandant, who was described as "unashamed" at the camp conditions, has been placed under arrest.

say a little prayer for these souls when you go to bed tonight