There was a museum and visitor centre at the entrance in 1976 or 77.
A straight wiki filtch ...
However, for a long time remembering Bergen-Belsen was not a political priority. Periods of attention were followed by long phases of official neglect. For much of the 1950s Belsen "was increasingly forgotten as a place of remembrance".[25] Only after 1957 large groups of young people visited the place where Anne Frank had died. Then after anti-Semitic graffiti was scrawled on the Cologne synagogue on Christmas 1959, German chancellor Konrad Adenauer followed a suggestion by Nahum Goldmann, president of the World Jewish Congress and for the very first time visited the site of a former concentration camp. In a speech at the Bergen-Belsen memorial Adenauer assured the Jews still living in Germany that they would have the same respect and security as everyone else.[27] Afterwards, the German public saw the Belsen memorial as a primarily Jewish place of remembrance. Nevertheless, the memorial was redesigned in 1960/61. In 1966 a document centre was opened which offered a permanent exhibition on the persecution of the Jews, with a focus on events in the nearby Netherlands - where Anne Frank and her family had been arrested in 1944. This was complemented by an overview of the history of the Bergen-Belsen camp. This was the first ever permanent exhibit anywhere in Germany on the topic of Nazi crimes.[27] However, there was still no scientific personnel at the site, with only a janitor as permament staff. Memorial events were only organized by the survivors themselves.
In October 1979, the president of the European Parliament Simone Veil, who was herself a survivor of Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen, came to the memorial for a speech which focused on the Nazi persecution of Roma and Sinti. This was the first time that an official event in Germany acknowledged this aspect of the Nazi era.
In 1985 international attention was focused on Bergen-Belsen when the camp was hastily included in Ronald Reagan's itinerary when he visited West Germany after a controversy about a visit to a cemetery where the interred included members of the Waffen SS (see Bitburg). Shortly before Reagan's visit on May 5, there had been a large memorial event on occassion of the 40th anniversary of the camp's liberation, which had been attended by German president Richard von Weizsäcker and German chancellor Helmut Kohl.[28] In the aftermath of these events the parliament of Lower Saxony decided to expand the exhibition center and to hire permanent scientific staff. In 1990 the permanent exhibition was replaced by a new version and a larger document building was opened.
Only in 2000 did the Federal government of Germany begin to financially support the memorial. Co-financed by the state of Lower Saxony, a complete redesign was planned which was intended to be more in line with contemporary thought on exhibition design.[29] On April 15, 2005 there was a ceremony, commemorating the 50th anniversary of the liberation and many ex-prisoners and ex-liberating troops attended.[30][31] In October 2007 the redesigned memorial site was opened, including a large new Documentation Centre and permanent exhibition on the edge of the newly redefined camp, whose structure and layout can now be traced. Since 2009 the memorial has been receiving funding from the Federal government on an ongoing basis.[32]
The Jewish Memorial at the site of the former camp, decorated with wreaths on Liberation Day, April 15, 2012.
The site is open to the public and includes monuments to the dead, including a successor to the wooden cross of 1945, some individual memorial stones and a "House of Silence" for reflection. In addition to the Jewish, Polish and Dutch national memorials, in December 2012 a memorial to eight Turkish citizens who were killed at Belsen was dedicated.[33] [34]