Padre Capt. Leslie Henry Hardman

Bergen-Belsen, or Belsen, was in Lower Saxony, south-west of the town of Bergen in Germany. It had no gas chambers, as the mass executions took place in the camps further east. But the camp – originally designed to hold 10,000 inmates – housed, by April 1945, some 60,000 prisoners; and disease, particularly typhus, was rife. An estimated 50,000 people perished in the camp, among them Anne Frank, who died of typhus in March 1945.

On April 15 1945 the British unit to which Hardman was attached liberated Belsen. He was not present at this event, but on the following day he was called to see his commanding officer, who told him: "Keep a stiff upper lip. We've just been into Belsen concentration camp and it's horrible; but you have got to go there – you'll find a lot of your people."

Hardman drove to Belsen on April 17, and he later described in his book The Survivors: the story of the Belsen Remnant (1958) the sight which greeted him as he entered the camp: "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. 'My God, the dead walk,' I cried aloud, but I did not recognise my voice."

The vast majority of inmates Hardman saw on that day were seriously ill, and some 13,000 corpses still lay unburied around the camp.

The survivors crowded around Hardman, "[peering] at the double star, the emblem of Jewry on my tunice - one poor creature touched and then stroked the badge of my faith, and finding that it was real murmured, 'Rabbiner, Rabbiner'."

In the days that followed Hardman did his utmost to comfort, provide help and bolster morale. "I sat there for hours," he later recalled, "smoking, talking, listening. I spoke to them of Jewish religion and Jewish life."

On one occasion a survivor made a quavering attempt to sing a few lines of 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 Belsen survivor later described Hardman as "our Messiah", telling how Hardman "spoke to us in Yiddish and gave us tremendous hope [but while] thousands listened to him, all around inmates were dying".

Despite the best efforts of the British to help the survivors, some 9,000 inmates died in April alone. By the end of June another 4,000 had perished.

Years after the event, Hardman told a correspondent from the BBC: "If all the trees in the world turned into pens, all the waters in the oceans turned into ink and the heavens turned into paper, it would still be insufficient material to describe the horrors these people suffered under the SS."

Leslie Henry Hardman was born into a Jewish family at Glynneath, Wales, on February 18 1913. His father had emigrated to Britain from Poland, while his mother came from Russia.

When Britain declared war against Germany in September 1939 Hardman enlisted as an Army chaplain. After training he was stationed in Hertfordshire with the East Central District of the Eastern Command.

While serving in the military, Hardman remained observant, eating with Jewish families rather than in the mess hall with other officers; he prayed with other recruits, and arranged that he would not have to travel anywhere on Shabbat.

In the autumn of 1944 Hardman was sent to Holland, where he learned of the atrocities perpetrated against Jews. He spent time there with members of the remaining Jewish community, celebrating Chanukah with them. From Holland he was sent to Germany, where he remained until the end of the war.

After the war Hardman returned to England, serving the Jewish community at Hendon United Synagogue, of which he was Rabbi for many years. He was also the chaplain to the psychiatric unit at Edgware Hospital and a strong supporter of the Holocaust Educational Trust.

Leslie Hardman was appointed MBE in 1998. In 1995 he was honoured by the Simon Wiesenthal Museum of Tolerance.

His wife, Josi, whom he married in 1936, died last year, and he is survived by two daughters; two other daughters predeceased him.

If anyone addressed Leslie Hardman as “rabbi” they were sure to hear about it — from Hardman himself. He always styled himself “the Rev”. He was an Orthodox Jewish minister of what is now a very old school, learned, cultured and tolerant.

He did have a rabbinical ordination, but the title of “Rev”, which has now gone completely out of fashion, somehow suited him better. And he had one qualification to use it that was unique: he was the British Army chaplain who went in with the troops who liberated the infamous Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945.

Hardman was 32 at the time, and it was an experience that moulded his life for ever after. For 60 years after driving into the camp reeking of the thousands of emaciated dead bodies — and the barely alive — around him, he suffered nightmares which he never learnt to shake off.

He was minister (another title now gone into abeyance) for 35 years of one of London’s leading Jewish congregations, one of the most popular men to occupy a pulpit in the capital. But it was his own experience of the Holocaust that made him a public figure, both within his community and outside it. When BBC television produced a special, 'The Relief of Belsen', in 2007, his part was played by an actor. Hardman never saw the programme but he was glad that there was emphasis on the suffering of the inmates. “One member of my congregation complained that I was seen in it without a kippar \. Can you imagine that? There I was, burying thousands of bodies, and all this man cared about was that I wasn’t wearing a hat.”

That statement alone indicated how different he was from the Orthodox colleagues who followed him.

Leslie Hardman was born in Glynneath, South Wales, in 1913 into one of the dozens of immigrant families who went to live in the valleys and worked as small traders. He was a small boy when the family moved to Liverpool, where he attended — he always spoke about it proudly as though he were recalling days at Eton or Harrow — the Hope Street Jewish School. It was round the corner, he liked to say, to Hardman Street. “No connection to my family,” he would insist.

He attended a yeshivah or religious seminary and then Leeds University, where he took his BA and then MA. He married in 1936, two years after becoming minister of the Jewish community at St Anne’s, where he was also the ritual slaughterer. From there he took a ministerial appointment in Leeds.

In 1942 he joined the Army as a chaplain. It was on April 15, 1945, that the formative event of his life occurred. He later described how he was told to report to the colonel. He said: “We have uncovered a concentration camp. It is horrible, ghastly, sickening. Most of the inmates are your people. You should go there now. They need you.”

As Hardman said, he had never felt more needed in his life. He immediately set about trying to bring comfort to the survivors and then saying the memorial prayer, the Kaddish, over the dead as he tried to persuade the bulldozer drivers who were thrusting the bodies into a pit to bury them with some kind of dignity.

The amazing thing, he recalled, was the effect his uniform had on the inmates. “They saw the Star of David on my cap and my tunic and they at first couldn’t understand it. Then, they regarded me as a kind of messiah.”

One woman who was so emaciated that he at first found it difficult to be with her, begged him not to leave her. He recalled that he spent an hour talking to her in Yiddish before conducting prayers, the first they had heard for years.

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.

On April 15 1945, the British 11th Armoured Division, chasing the remnants of the Nazi army in Lower Saxony, came upon and liberated the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, then under SS control. Accompanying the division was Richard Dimbleby of the BBC and the Rev Leslie Hardman, then a young Jewish army chaplain, who has died aged 95.

Dimbleby's brilliant, chilling account of the suffering and degradation that he found at the camp shocked the British public. For Hardman, charged with the task of officiating at the burial of tens of thousands of the corpses of his co-religionists, the liberation was also a defining moment. For a brief instant he questioned his own faith. His doubts were answered, in and through a determination to assist in and witness the re-establishment of an independent Jewish state. His Judaism and his Zionism were inseparable thereafter.

Hardman was born in Glynneath, South Wales, less than two years after a series of organised attacks, carried out mainly by mineworkers, that had driven many orthodox Jewish families out of the Welsh valley communities in which they had settled as refugees from Tsarist persecution. His family moved to Liverpool, where he grew up within a practising orthodox Jewish household. He evinced a vocation for the ministry, but combined purely religious studies at yeshivot (seminaries) in Liverpool and Manchester with attendance at Leeds University, where he gained a BA and then an MA degree in Hebrew and Semitics. In due course he obtained a ministerial appointment at St Anne's in Lancashire, subsequently moving back to Leeds.

Hardman was then a run-of-the-mill Anglo-Jewish clergyman, complete with clerical dog collar (then worn even by the likes of Chief Rabbi Joseph H Hertz), combining the duties of synagogue officiant with teaching in religion classes and acting also as local shochet - poultry and cattle slaughterer. He was not a "rabbi" - that is, a recipient of a rabbinical diploma awarded after prolonged study and intensive examination - and neither was, nor ever claimed to be, an authority on the Talmud. His great strength lay rather in his capacity for pastoral work, in which he was immeasurably assisted by his wife, Josi, whom he had married in 1936. Hardman possessed all the qualities necessary for social work. He was a good listener. He was imbued with a great deal of common sense. He never talked down to those (and they included non-Jews) who sought his advice.

These qualities were put to the supreme test during the war. In 1942, with Chief Rabbi Hertz's support and imprimatur, he joined the British Army as a chaplain. Famously, Hardman insisted on carrying a gun in his holster. Through the experience of Belsen he gained a deep insight into the ideology of the anti-semite. He was present at an early interrogation of the camp commandant, Josef Kramer; the experience of this encounter made as great an impression on him as the horrors of the camp itself, for Kramer (hanged in December 1945) was without the slightest regret or remorse. In 1958, assisted by Cecily Goodman, Hardman published The Survivors, a grim record of his Belsen days, which became a sourcebook for the 2007 BBC TV docudrama The Relief of Belsen.

In 1947, Hardman was appointed minister of the Hendon Synagogue, in north-west London. The Hendon community was well-to-do, but not very observant. It boasted a mixed-sex choir, which Hardman abolished in 1951, and its interior was practically rebuilt in 1963 so as to conform to strict orthodox requirements.

Hardman was no fundamentalist. He had no qualms about politely kissing his female congregants in public, and more than once was known to berate his congregation for being more concerned with the performance of ritual than with the pursuit of ethics. He supported the "heretic" rabbi Louis Jacobs, whom Chief Rabbi Israel Brodie prevented from becoming principal of Jews' College on account of Jacobs' views on the divine origin of the Torah. Yet Hardman believed strongly in the inclusivist mission of the United Synagogue (of which Hendon was a constituent); there was never any question of him following Jacobs into whatever lay beyond its boundaries.

Hardman's relationship with his congregants was not a uniformly happy one. He was a Zionist, but, more than that, he was a paid-up member of Herut, the party of the violently anti-British Menachem Begin. Hardman was also acutely aware of the political influence that the Jews of Hendon might wield, if they chose to, and he positively delighted in disobeying the admonitions of the Board of Deputies of British Jews, the leadership of which deprecated any invocation of Jewish political pressure at the hustings. During and after the Yom Kippur war (1973) he was unashamed in his use of the pulpit for political purposes. In 1974, he urged Jews in Hendon North to support John Gorst, the sitting Tory MP who had voted against the Heath government's embargo of arms shipments to Israel. Six years later, he issued a scarcely veiled warning to Margaret Thatcher, in neighbouring Finchley, after Lord Carrington (as foreign secretary) had declared that the Palestine Liberation Organisation was not "terrorist". Generally, however, Hardman's relationship with Thatcher was positive, even amiable.

On his retirement in 1982, Hardman was made emeritus minister of the Hendon Synagogue. He immersed himself in Holocaust education work, and was appointed MBE in 1998. His wife died in 2007. There were four daughters of the marriage, two of whom predeceased him. He is survived by two daughters, seven grandchildren and 26 great-grandchildren.

· Leslie Henry Hardman, clergyman, born February 18 1913; died October 7 2008