Soviet Union:
"Mass Graves containing the bodies of 12,500"
Investigators digging at the site of a Soviet-run prison camp in
the former East Germany have uncovered mass graves containing the bodies
of 12,500 people, the Brandenburg state government said today.
The camp was at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, and was open
from 1945 to 1950. Victims were said to have included real and supposed
supporters of the defeated Third Reich, as well as citizens considered
unfriendly to Communist authorities.
Until the Communist Government of East Germany collapsed in
1990, it was impossible to conduct research like that now under way
at Sachsenhausen. Similar excavations are underway at other sites, and
officials expect further discoveries like the one announced today.
The excavation around Sachsenhausen revealed 50 graves, each
about 25 feet long and 13 feet wide. Under the earth, bodies were stacked
in heaps as high as 15 feet and higher.
Pathologists have determined that most of the victims died
of starvation, exposure or communicable diseases. Some had evidently
been beaten. Most were children, adolescents and elderly people.
In the years after the end of World War II, occupying Soviet
forces imprisoned thousands of Germans. Many were accused of war crimes,
and their trials were perfunctory if they were held at all. Some were
simply picked off the street, victims of Stalinist crackdowns.
The victims were taken to one of a network of prison camps.
Some of them, like the one at Sachsenhausen and another at Buchenwald,
were built on the sites of Nazi concentration camps.
The German Government estimated that 65,000 people died in
those Soviet run camps or in transportation to them.
During the four decades of Communist rule in East Germany,
memorials were built at places like Sachsenhausen and Buchenwald. But
the memorials implied that the camps closed at the war's end. They did
not mention that in the post-Nazi era, the camps became brutal Soviet-run
military prisons.
Source : The New York Times - September 24, 1992
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