THE name Belsen is synonymous with the horrors carried out by the Nazis and for one Redditch man, the memory of spending just one day there still haunts him to this day.

Tomorrow, the nation will mark Holocaust Memorial Day, remembering the estimated six million Jews and other civilians murdered in the worst single act of genocide history has known.

In 1945, Robert Butler was a 21-year-old soldier with the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers and had spent nine gruelling months fighting through France, Belgium and Holland to Germany.

He and his unit were just a few miles from Bergen-Belsen in north-west Germany in early April as the Second World War was nearing its end and news filtered through that other British troops had taken a prison camp. He and two other engineers were immediately ordered to drive there to see if they could help.

Mr Butler, now 80, of Crumpfields Lane, Webheath, said: "I'd never heard of the place so, of course, none of us knew what to expect.

"It was in the middle of a thick pine forest. A very strange isolated place, which you wouldn't know was there.

"What greeted us was a huge pit. It must have been 14ft deep and the size of half a football pitch, piled with bodies. Camp guards had been rounded up by our troops and were literally chucking the bodies in. I had seen some horrific things but this was shocking. To see that many dead men, women and children was just horrendous."

When British forces liberated the camp, it is estimated there were as many as 15,000 bodies lying above ground and another 50,000 skeletal survivors crammed into huts, too weak with disease to move.

Mr Butler said the sickly sweet stench of death was stomach churning.

Belsen was also the place where the young diarist Anne Frank died just weeks before liberation.

Mr Butler said he felt helpless in the face of such desperation. He and his two comrades helped many of the prisoners out of the huts into hot sunshine but he said there was little else they could offer.

Perhaps his most disturbing memory is that of the camp crematorium.

"We walked down this very rough path to the crematorium and I spotted this strange object on the ground which I picked up. I realised it was actually a child's hand. The path was actually laid with the burnt and unburnt contents of the crematoria. That's when the horror really came home."

He added: "I felt anger. War hardens you but this was something different. Afterwards, in a funny sort of way, I always felt I needed to help people."

Mr Butler, originally from Buxton in Derbyshire, finally left Germany and the army in 1947.

He moved to Redditch in the early 1960s to work for the county council, managing what later became Millfields Day Care Centre for adults with learning difficulties in Enfield.

Tomorrow, as part of the Holocaust commemorations, he has been invited to a ceremony at St James's Palace in London and later Westminster Hall and will meet the Queen and Prince Phillip, which he described as a great honour.

But his overriding concern now is that the memories of what the Nazis did are passed on.

"I'm shocked when I hear that young people know nothing about the war or the Holocaust. Some don't even know it happened. It's important this is passed on."

Redditch will hold its Holocaust Memorial commemorations on Saturday.

A procession will leave Redditch Town Hall at 11.45am and gather in the Kingfisher Centre at noon, when a service will be held.