Duke And Duchess Visit Nazi Concentration Camp

The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge have been on a guided tour of a Nazi concentration camp where tens of thousands of people died.

William and Kate, who are on a five-day trip to Poland and Germany, travelled through the gates of the former Stutthof camp to learn about the atrocities committed by Hitler's forces.

At the Nazi camp, built in what is now Poland, as many as 65,000 people, including 28,000 members of the Jewish community, died before it was liberated by the Allies in May 1945.

Stutthof, about 20 miles from Gdansk, is now run as a museum and the Duke and Duchess met senior staff from the institution before being taken to a barracks and shown discarded shoes from Holocaust victims.

When the couple walked on to the main complex, before them were the remains of the camp with some huts left intact showing the cramped living conditions.

The atmospheric wooden buildings featured pictures of inmates and some of their personal possessions, from combs and children's dolls to portraits drawn by incarcerated artists.

Stutthof was created as a prison camp at the start of the war and became a concentration camp in 1942.

It was not an extermination site like Auschwitz-Birkenau, although it did have a small gas chamber used to murder prisoners considered too sick to work.

Tens of thousands of Jews died mainly from disease, malnutrition, physical exhaustion, exposure to the harsh climate and abuse from guards.

Picture Credit: Twitter/KensingtonRoyal