Between 1941 and 1945 almost 70,000 inmates died at the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in northwestern Germany. Almost half of these deaths were caused by disease, mainly typhus, in the first few months of 1945, shortly before and after the liberation. It was at this time, in April of 1945, that Michael Hargrave answered an advertisement at the Westminster Hospital Medical School for volunteers . On the day of his departure the 21-year-old learned that he was being sent to Bergen-Belsen, liberated only a few weeks before.