SECOND World War hero Lieutenant Colonel Leonard Berney has died. He was 95.

Mr Berney passed away unexpectedly on the Caribbean island of St Vincent.

As a 25-year-old British Army major, he helped liberate the notorious Bergen-Belsen concentration camp from the Nazis.

Mr Berney (pictured) was the first husband of Patricia Wood, the widow of Kenneth Wood, who founded the Kenwood Manufacturing Company, who created Old Thorns Golf Club at Griggs Green.

Berney’s son John Wood, director of World Wide PR, told The Herald about his father’s legacy, after two post-war documentaries entitled ‘Night Will Fall’ and ‘German Concentration Camps Factual Survey’ were released in the autumn of 2014, involving his father, who for the last six years lived on a private residential cruiser called ‘The World’.

Night Will Fall was put together after the discovery of film footage from the Second World War that turned out to be a lost documentary shot by Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Bernstein (later founder of Granada TV) in 1945 about German concentration camps.

When Allied forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps in 1944-45, their terrible discoveries were recorded by army and newsreel cameramen, revealing for the first time the full horror of what had happened.

Despite support from the British and United States governments, the film was shelved, and 70 years on, it was restored and completed by the Imperial War Museum.

The documentary by André Singer tells the extraordinary story of the filming of the camps and the fate of Bernstein’s project, using original archive footage and eyewitness testimonies.

One of the children Berney rescued was 16-year old Nanette Blitz Konig from Holland, who moved to Sao Paulo, in Brazil, with her husband John in 1953.

Nanette was Anne Frank’s classmate and features in her world-famous diary. She accredited Lt Col Berney with her surviving the horrors of Bergen-Belsen.

Anne Frank died in the camp in March 1945, just before its liberation days later on April 15.

In 1951, Berney married Patricia Purser, but the marriage was later dissolved.

She survives him with two sons. Another son predeceased him.