I was watching the 1985 PBS Frontline documentary "Memory of the Camps," which is a reconstruction of a documentary put together soon after the war using footage and recordings from the liberation of Nazi concentration camps.
In a segment about Ludwigslust/Wöbbelin footage is shown of what looks like bunked cots wrapped and draped in barbed wire, while the narrator (in 1985 using the original text I believe) says that men were forced to sleep on barbed wire.
To be clear, I am as far from a Holocaust denier as possible, this just wasn't something I'd ever encountered, and I'm pretty familiar with the horrors of the camps.
On a related matter I suppose, what is the perception of this Frontline piece in the minds of historians?
(standard "sorry if this has been asked before" disclaimer)
I believe the photo you are referring to is this one of Monsieur Della Giacomo of Limoges, France lies on a bunk made of barbed-wire and rags in the newly liberated Woebbelin concentration camp.
The camp in Wöbbelin near the town of Ludwigslust was not a camp on its own but rather a sub-camp of Neuengamme, that existed for ten weeks in 1945.
Opening in February of 1945, it was intended as a camp for evacuated prisoners from other camps. When Allied troops started approaching Concentration Camps, the Nazis usually tried to evacuate the prisoners to prevent them from being liberated. About 5000 people were brought to the Wöbbelin camp and 1000 didn't survive until liberation. The problem with Wöbbelin was that Allied troops in form of the 82nd Airborne were advancing to fast for the Nazis to really make this camp work like they had previous camps. Thus Nazi authorities neither finished the camp nor really put any effort in supplying the camp. They pretty much gave it up at some point in April. Therefore the Wöbbelin camp became what scholarship refers to as "Sterbelager", i.e. a camp where the Nazis brought prisoners to die of starvation and disease.
The barbed wire bunks need to be seen in that context. The barbed wire bunks were most likely a result of improvisation. In Wöbbelin, the bunks similar to a lot of the barracks and other camp infrastructure was never finished. The liberating troops report that a lot of the prisoners had to sleep on the floors of the unfinished barracks or under the sky during the night. They also found unfinished bunks (as can be seen here) as well as the barbed wire bunks. It is a reasonable assumption that when the bunks were not finished despite thousands of prisoners flooding the camp, somebody came up with the idea to use barbed wire as a sort of hammock device for the prisoners. As can be seen on the first photo, there is rags and straw tangeled up in the barbed wire thus suggesting that rather than a pure torturing device, these kind of bunks were really intended for people to sleep in.
It can however be not reconstructed who cam up with the idea since given that the Nazis abandoned the camp and its prisoners in April 1945 to let the prisoners die a slow and agonizing death, it could have been the prisoners themselves who came up with the idea of using these barbed wire hammocks in order to alleviate the overcorwded sleeping on the floor or under the sky.
What can be said with certainty is that this use of barbed wire as bunks was not widespread in the camps and most likely the result of the Wöbbelin camp being unfinished towards the end of the war.
Sources:
Photos from the USHMM photo archive.
Carina Baganz: Wöbbelin: Das letzte Außenlager des KZ Neuengamme als Sterbelager. In: Detlef Garbe, Carmen Lange (Hrsg.): Häftlinge zwischen Vernichtung und Befreiung. Die Auflösung des KZ Neuengamme und seiner Außenlager durch die SS im Frühjahr 1945. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2005, S. 105–116.
Carina Baganz: Zehn Wochen KZ Wöbbelin. Ein Konzentrationslager in Mecklenburg 1945. Mahn- und Gedenkstätten Wöbbelin, Wöbbelin 2000.
As a further potential source, check out this interview with one of the liberators of the camp, Morton Katz