concentration camp prisoners did not reach the squadrons in time to halt the attack. Survivors who jumped into the water were strafed by cannon fire from the RAF aircraft or shot by Nazi officials. Thousands of dead washed ashore just as the British Army successfully occupied the area on land. The British forced German POWs and civilians to dig mass graves for the dead. Approximately 7,100 prisoners and officials died in the raid; only 450 prisoners survived. 600–700 concentration camp prisoners remained in the main camp under SS orders to destroy all incriminating documentation, dismantle many areas of the camp, and tidy the site. On 2 May 1945, the SS and the last of the prisoners left the Neuengamme concentration camp. The first British soldiers arrived the next day and, seeing a barren and clean site, reported the concentration camp as "empty". After the war In the first post-war months, the camp was used as a Soviet displaced persons camp, with German POWs held separately. In June, British forces began to use the site as an internment camp for witnesses, SS members and Nazi officials, called Civil Internment Camp No. 6. The Civil Internment Camp No. 6 was closed on 13 August 1948, and the grounds were transferred to the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg, which then built and opened a prison on the site of the former prisoners’ bunkers in 1950. Several original buildings from the former camp were used for various purposes by the prisons until their closing in February 2006. Displaced Persons Camp Neuengamme In May 1945 the British military government began to construct DP Camps in Hamburg. Responsible for this was the unit "Displaced Persons Assembly Centre Staffs" (DPACS) which was supported by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA). Displaced Persons received a special status under the British military government. It included people, who were in foreign countries because of the war and needed help returning home. This includes former slave laborers and concentration camp inmates. On the site of former Concentration Camp Neuengamme about ten thousand Soviet slave laborers were housed. A different piece of the site was used for German prisoners of war. Under the special requirement from the Soviet Union made in 1944 to take back all citizens, repatriation began on 9 May, only four days after the DP Camp was established. In general, the situation in the accommodations of