There were worn paths to each of the gas chambers and on the side a pile of spectacles at least six feet high. "Returning to his tank, Bob Daniell summoned another unit by radio, instructing them to bring medical and diet teams."There were at least 3, 000 inmates still just alive They were all starving, and skeletons to look at. "He next saw the gas ovens, which had been cleaned out because there was no fuel to run them. This was why there were so many corpses lying around: in the previous fortnight no fewer than 9, 000 people had died in the camp, of starvation, typhus, dysente r y and other diseases."It was pathetic. Unless they were visisbly trying to kill me I normally would not have shot them, but with these men, their actions were so appalling that I did, without hesitating.

I had already fought one war in the desert and I was very used to coming across armed men. "Bob Daniell is certain that in his two hours at Belsen he never lost control, but this was the nearest he came to an action in the heat of emotion "I was extremely tough. "Hearing shots in the distance he made his way to the perimiter wire to find that a group of prisoners who had attempted to escape were caught on the wire. Half a dozen Hitler Youths were amusing themselves by pulling these people down and shooting them, "not to kill, but to cause the most pain. They were shooting the men in the balls and stretching these naked women out and shooting them in the crotch It really was an unspeakable sight I shot four of the Hitler Youth and the other two ran away. The occupants themselves were incapable of moving, let alone of cleaning out the straw. In the first two were hundreds of people, as thin as skeletons, in the last stages of starvation."The hangars were foul The smell was perfectly appalling They had not been cleaned out for at least two months.

"The sight and the smell were completely appalling; they were all completely naked and many of them no doubt had typhus I didn't stay to see more I left the door open and found a guard to show me the rest "He visited three more buildings. Every bed was occupied, but 90 per cent of the patients were dead, many of them drowned in excreta from the beds above All had been too weak to move. This was the natural gases and acids from the bodies at work. "Instructing his men to have their breakfast (an order which, unsurprisingly, they found it impossible to obey), he set off "very foolishly" alone to see what he could find.Behind the first door he broke open he found the camp hospital, a hangar full of bunk beds eight tiers high.

Then he parked and got down, to find himself looking into a trench 150 yards long, and filled with naked bodies "Parts of the corpses kept moving. You would see an arm rise, then a leg, and sometimes whole bodies would come to the surface. Belsen was not found until April, but it was the only camp liberated by the British Army, and it was from there that the newsreel imagescame which scarred the minds of a generation of Britons. Bob Daniell saw it all first.He entered Belsen by smashing through the gates in his tank and then knocking down the first building he came to, sending Germans fleeing in all directions. So it was that Belsen was discovered.Fifty years ago this month, the first of the death camps were liberated by the Russians as they swept through Poland. His suspicion aroused, he went to investigate and found that the wagons contained what he describes as "very recent bodies".He reported to his brigadier that he believed the gate might lead to a concentration camp and asked permission to take a look The brigadier, anxious to press forward, gave him two hours.