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British Army Sergeant Norman Midgley must have thought he had seen it all by April 1945. Even before the war started, he had seen his fair share of both the best and worst of humanity in his vocation as a staff photographer for the Daily Express newspaper based in Manchester, England. When the war started the British Army therefore had a specific task for him in mind given his experience and expertise; specifically as a member of the Army Film and Photographic Unit. 

It was his job to record in pictures the events experienced by British and Commonwealth forces in the fight against the Axis, he and his compatriots being embedded inside frontline British combat units. It was a role no less dangerous than any other soldier on the battlefield and in fact statistically, it was even more so with Midgeley’s unit alone suffering an appalling 1-in-4 casualty rate. 

By the time he found himself travelling in a jeep to a remote location being held by the British 11th Armoured Division in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen on April 18th 1945, much of the fighting had begun to die down and instead he found himself with a new task; recording evidence of Nazi crimes. In that regard, he was told he was being taken to something particularly ghastly and inhuman.

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