Sachsenhausen (concentration camp)

Created in July 1936 ^[1] . The number of prisoners in different years reached 60,000 people ^[2] . On the territory of Sachsenhausen, over 100,000 prisoners died in various ways ^[3] .

Here, “personnel” were trained and retrained for the newly created and already created camps. Since August 2, 1936, the headquarters of the " Inspection of Concentration Camps " was located near the camp, and in March 1942 it became part of the Management Group "D" (concentration camps) of the Main Administrative Department of the SS .

There was an underground resistance committee in the camp, which led a ramified, well-conspired camp organization, which the Gestapo could not disclose. The leader of the underground is General Zotov Alexander Semenovich (see below the recollections of the Invisible Front prisoners.

April 21, 1945 , in accordance with the issued order, the death march began. It was supposed that over 30 thousand prisoners in convoys of 500 people should be transferred to the shore of the Baltic Sea , loaded onto barges, taken to the open sea and flooded. People lagging behind and exhausted on the march were shot. So, in the forest near Belov in Mecklenburg , several hundred prisoners were shot. However, the planned mass destruction of the prisoners was not possible - in early May 1945, Soviet troops liberated the columns of prisoners on the march.

According to the memoirs of G.N. van der Bel, a prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp at number 38190 ^[4] :

On the night of April 20, 26,000 prisoners left Sachsenhausen - this march began. Before leaving the camp, we rescued the sick brothers from the infirmary. We took out the cart on which they were taken. In total we were 230 people from six countries. Among the sick was Brother Arthur Winkler, who did much to expand the Kingdom's work in the Netherlands . We Witnesses walked behind everyone and constantly encouraged each other not to stop.

[...]

Although about half of the prisoners who participated in the death march either died or were killed along the way, all the Witnesses survived.

According to the memoirs of Boyko N.E. prisoner of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp ^[4] :

No matter how I tried to stay on my feet, still collapsed. The bag fell nearby, burst, the cement crumbled. The guard, having seen such a picture, jumped up to me with a machine gun, at the end of which there was a bayonet. He would have pierced me through if I, having gathered my last strength, had not dodged. With a bayonet, he still got me and poked my leg above the knee. In the heat of time I ran. The German raised his machine gun. The prisoners cried out in a voice, and he did not pull the trigger. And only then I felt that blood was flowing down my leg ...

On April 22, 1945, the advanced units of the Soviet army broke into the camp itself, where at that time about 3,000 prisoners remained ^[5] .

Tower A

Tower "A" was a distribution control panel for current control, which was fed to the grid and barbed wire encircling the camp in the form of a large triangle. Also in it was the commandant's office of the camp. In addition, this tower was a checkpoint camp. There was a cynical inscription on the gate: “ Arbeit macht frei ” (“Labor liberates”). In total, there were nineteen towers in the camp, which, through their sectors, shot through the entire camp.

Appelplatz

Place of roll call that took place 3 times a day. In case of escape, the prisoners had to stand on it until the escaped was captured. The parade ground was also the place of public executions - there was a gallows on it.

Shoe Testing Track

Nine different coatings of the track around the parade ground, as planned by the Nazis, were necessary for testing shoes. The selected prisoners had to overcome forty-kilometer distances at a different pace every day. In 1944, the Gestapo officers complicated this test, forcing prisoners to overcome the distance in shoes of smaller sizes and with bags weighing ten, and often twenty-twenty-five kilograms. The prisoners were sentenced to such a check on the quality of shoes for periods ranging from one month to a year. For particularly serious crimes, an indefinite sentence was imposed. Repeated attempts to escape, escape, invading another hut, sabotage, dissemination of messages from foreign transmitters, incitement to sabotage, pedophilia (Art. 176), seducing or forcing homosexual contacts of heterosexual men of the main camp, homosexual prostitution, by mutual consent, were considered such crimes. homosexual acts of heterosexual men. The same indefinite punishment awaited homosexuals who arrived in Sachsenhausen (arts. 175 and 175a) ^[6] .

"Testing shoes" - officers' (chrome) boots were subjected to the usual "wear" for future potential owners. The prisoners withstood the largest −1 month, because the legs were swollen and worn down to blood. A day was supposed to carry (?) A pair of boots.

Z Station

Station “Z” is a building outside the camp, where massacres were carried out. It contained a device for firing at the back of the head, a crematorium for four furnaces, and a gas chamber attached in 1943 . Sometimes vehicles with people, bypassing registration in the camp, went there directly. In this regard, it is not possible to establish the exact number of victims killed here.

Shot Moat

The so-called "shooting gallery", with a shooting rampart, a morgue and a mechanized gallows . The latter was a mechanism with a box in which the prisoner's legs were inserted, and a loop for his head. It turned out that the victim was not hanged, but stretched, after which they practiced shooting ^[7] .

Hospital Hut

On the territory of Sachsenhausen, medical experiments were conducted. The camp supplied medical schools in Germany with anatomical demonstration facilities.

Prison Building

The camp (and Gestapo) prison of Zelenbau ( German: Zellenbau ) was built in 1936 and had a T-shape. Eighty solitary confinement cells held special prisoners. Among them, the first commander of the Army, the regional general Stefan Grot-Rovecki , who was shot in Sachsenhausen after the start of the Warsaw Uprising . Here were also some leaders of the Ukrainian nationalist movement, such as Stepan Bandera , Taras Bulba-Borovets , some of whom were released by the Germans at the end of 1944. The prisoner of this prison was also Pastor Nimeller . It contained other clergymen (about 600 in total), state and prominent political figures, senior military officials, as well as workers from Poland , France , the Netherlands , Hungary , the USSR , Czechoslovakia , Luxembourg and Germany . Currently, only one wing of the prison has been preserved, in five chambers of which there is a permanent exhibition of documents from the time of National Socialism, telling about the functioning of the prison. In some other cells (General Grot-Rovetsky), memorial plaques are installed for prisoners of the camp.

According to available information, representatives of sexual minorities were detained in the camp, among others. From the beginning of the existence of the concentration camp to 1943, 600 carriers of the pink winkel died in the camp. Since 1943, homosexuals worked mainly in the camp hospital as doctors or carers. After the war, most of the surviving gay prisoners were unable to receive compensation from the German government ^[8] .

In August 1945, the "Special Camp N ° 7" of the NKVD was transferred here.

It contained former prisoners of war - Soviet citizens who were waiting for their return to the Soviet Union, former members of the Nazi party, social democrats dissatisfied with the communist system, as well as former German Wehrmacht officers and foreigners. In 1948, the camp was renamed to "Special Camp N ° 1". "Special Camp N ° 1" - the largest of the three special camps for internees in the Soviet zone of occupation - was closed in 1950 .

In 1956, the GDR government established a national memorial in the camp, which was inaugurated on April 23, 1961 . It was planned to dismantle most of the original buildings and establish an obelisk, a statue and a meeting place in accordance with the point of view of the then government. The role of political resistance was overemphasized and stood out in comparison with other groups.

Currently, the territory of Sachsenhausen is open to the public as a museum and memorial. Several buildings and structures have been preserved or reconstructed: watchtowers, concentration camp gates, crematorium furnaces and camp huts (on the Jewish side).

In 1992, a memorial plaque was opened in memory of homosexuals who died in a concentration camp. In 1998, the museum opened an exposition dedicated to Jehovah's Witnesses - prisoners of a concentration camp . In August 2001, an exposition dedicated to the NKVD special camp opened.

In 1947, 16 employees of the camp appeared before a court in Berlin. The Soviet military tribunal sentenced 14 people to hard labor for life; the other two received 15 years in the camps. 5 people died in Vorkutlag. The survivors were repatriated to Germany in 1956. Some of them again appeared in court.

In 1962, in the city of Verdun, a trial was held on the former adjutant of the commandant of the camp, Anton Kindl, SS Obersturmfuhrer Heinrich Wessel . As a result, he was sentenced to 7.5 years in prison for complicity in the killing of foreign workers.

In 1970, another process went through in Cologne. Otto Kaiser , Richard Hofmann , Erwin Seifert, Joseph Negele, Willy Busse, Kurt Simke, Heinz-Willy Birbaum and Arthur Brown appeared before the court. Hoffman, Seifert, Negele, Busse and Kaiser were sentenced to life imprisonment. Kurt Simka got 10 years. Heinz-Willy Birbaum and Arthur Brown were acquitted.

• Libster M. In the furnace of horror: the story of a man who passed through fascist terror . - Per. from English - M.: Special Book, 2007, 250g, 192 pp., Ill. ISBN 978-5-9797-0003-8
• Max Liebster: Hoffnungsstrahl im Nazisturm. Geschichte eines Holocaustüberlebenden ; Esch-sur-Alzette, 2003; ISBN 2-87953-990-0
• The invisible front. Memories of former prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. - M :, Military Publishing House of the Ministry of Defense of the USSR, 1961, 272 p.
• Boyko N. E. I believe in immortality. Autobiographical essay. - Kursk :, Christian Publishing House 2006, 7 pp.

• Lazarus Medovar. “Sachsenhausen concentration camp. To the 60th anniversary of the Great Victory and the liberation of the camp ” (neopr.) . Date of treatment April 20, 2007. Archived February 22, 2012.
• “Homosexuals of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp” ” (neopr.) . Date of treatment April 20, 2007. Archived February 22, 2012.
• History of the Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg camp on the Jewish Virtual Library part of the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise
• Sachsenhausen among the Nazi camps (Germany), with list of its subcamps on a site is hosted by JewishGen, Inc
• Photos and some history of Sachsenhausen by scrapbookpages.com
• Ex-Death Camp tells the story of Nazi and Soviet horrors by New York Times