The relief of Belsen.

In 17 April 1945 a British ambulance unit was diverted from the front line to handle a medical crisis. Far from being a celebration, the British liberation of Belsen was a humanitarian catastrophe with 600 inmates a day dying from typhus or starvation. This dramatic reconstruction, pieced together from first-hand accounts left by British liberators, tells the story of how the British officers, fronted by Lt. Col. James Johnson handled the crisis firstly by creating a 'human laundry' to clear the inmates of typhus and then attempts to tackle starvation by the dispersal of Bengal famine mixture. Interspersed throughout is archive BBC newsreel footage of the camp and its victims and voiceover readings from the first-hand accounts of, among others, Lt. Col. Mervyn Gonin, Lt. Col. James Johnston, Dr. Hadassah Bimko, Nurse Jean McFarlane, Nurse Lotti Burns, Rabbi Leslie Hardman, Pte. Emmanuel Fischer and Brigadier Glyn Hughes.