In early April 1945, at the request of the British Army, the British Red Cross and the War Office called for 100 volunteer medical students from nine London teaching hospitals to assist in feeding starving Dutch children who had been liberated from German occupation by advancing Allied forces. However, in the meantime, British troops had liberated Bergen-Belsen concentration camp and the students were diverted there on the day they were due to travel to the Netherlands. The students had previously spent most of the Second World War at school and in medical training.

Bergen-Belsen, or Belsen, was a Nazi concentration camp in what is today Lower Saxony in northern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. Originally established as a prisoner of war camp, in 1943, parts of it became a concentration camp. Initially this was an "exchange camp", where Jewish hostages were held with the intention of exchanging them for German prisoners of war held overseas. The camp was later expanded to hold Jews from other concentration camps.