The Rev Leslie Hardman: British Army chaplain at the liberation of Belsen

The Allied liberation of the Nazi concentration camps was one of the defining events of the 20th century, and certainly the defining moment in the life of Leslie Hardman, a Jewish chaplain in the British Army. For Hardman, the appalling sights he witnessed in April 1945 when he arrived at Bergen-Belsen were to give him nightmares for the rest of his life.

Hardman was 32 when he was asked to travel to the concentration camp in Lower Saxony on the day after troops first entered it. "You have got to go there," an officer told him. "You'll find a lot of your people." The camp was strewn with thousands of dead, as well as thousands more who would soon be dead of typhus, too far gone to be helped by their rescuers. The sight would have been shocking for anyone, but for a Jewish minister it was a particularly distressing experience. Hardman later recalled his arrival: "Towards me came what seemed to be the remnants of a holocaust, a staggering mass of blackened skin and bones, held together somehow with filthy rags."

There were more than 10,000 corpses, wiped out by a combination of the Nazis and typhus: the disease had killed Anne Frank in the camp a month earlier. Another 13,000 would die in the months ahead. Over a matter of weeks, he and another Jewish army chaplain officiated at the burials of 20,000 people, who were interred with little ceremony or dignity.

Hardman's memories remained vivid 50 years later when, in a 2005 interview, he recalled the bodies being placed in mass graves: "I remember, as if it were yesterday, the irreverent manner in which I was compelled to conduct burial ceremonies covering thousands of naked and unnaked bodies. They brought them to the edge of the pit and then they slung them down. I'm not used to this. I said, 'Let's have a little bit more respect, a little honour of the dead'. And so one of the majors said to me, 'Padre, we've got to get them under the ground. Otherwise, we'll all suffer from typhus.' "

In his 1958 book The Survivors: the story of the Belsen remnant (written with Cecily Goodman), and elsewhere, Hardman related his "indescribable and hellish" memories. He remained in the camp for some time, trying to comfort the dying and to encourage the ill to fight for life. But he recalled how the dying did not stop with Belsen's liberation: "I tried to inspire them to keep them alive, but many were so sick, starving and badly beaten they just died in front of me," he said. He wrote that when one inmate tried to sing a Hebrew song, "the pathos of this attempt was so poignant that I put my head on the table and wept; and then they comforted me". A woman inmate described him as "a stalwart, strong man who sat and wept like a child".

After the war he remained in touch with some Belsen survivors, and attended many memorial occasions. He was haunted by his indelible memories and repeatedly voiced apologies for the mass burials, which he regarded as "acts of irreverence and disrespect".

Leslie Hardman was born to an immigrant family in South Wales in 1913; his mother was Russian and his father Polish. The family later moved to Liverpool, and Hardman attended Leeds University, taking a BA and an MA in Hebrew and Semitics before becoming a minister to the Jewish community in St Anne's, Lancashire, and then taking up an appointment in Leeds. In 1942 he enlisted as an Army chaplain, serving first in the Netherlands and then in Germany.

After the war he was appointed minister of the Hendon Synagogue, in north London, where he was known as a learned and cultured person and remained until his retirement in 1982. David Horovitz, later editor of The Jerusalem Post, recalled listening to him as a child: "Deliberate and grave, he spoke in rich, mellifluous tones and always seemed utterly unflappable. From my 11-year-old point of view, he looked and sounded about as close to God as a mere mortal could."

Hardman was a supporter of the Holocaust Educational Trust and was appointed MBE in 1998. His wife Josi died last year, after a marriage that lasted 71 years.

David McKittrick

Leslie Henry Hardman, cleric: born Glynneath, Glamorgan 18 February 1913; MBE 1998; married 1936 Josi Cohen (died 2007; two daughters, and two daughters deceased); died London 7 October 2008.