Sachsenhausen

The Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, occupied by the Soviets at war’s end, played a major role in Soviet post-war propaganda about Nazi atrocities in concentration camps. This propaganda included claims of homicidal gas chambers and other mass murder devices.

Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

The Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, located not far from Berlin, plays a small but lucrative role in the orthodoxy's arsenal of re-educational tools. Wartime documents from the Sachsenhausen Camp make it possible to determine extremely precisely the camp’s occupancy as well as its inmate mortality during the war. The Sachsenhausen case reveals the methods of Soviet atrocity propaganda during the immediate postwar period.

Sachsenhausen Camp

Although many have questioned the wisdom of prosecutions related to National-Socialist crimes so long after the events, the German government has stepped up a campaign of prosecution of elderly people who were marginally involved in the operation of German detention camps.[1] An example is the months-long trial of Josef Schuetz. Schuetz was Lithuanian-born German who…

The Origin of the Soviet Report on the “Next-Generation” Homicidal Gas Chamber at Sachsenhausen

According to the standard accounts of the camp, Sachsenhausen possessed a small homicidal gas chamber from 1943 to 1945, in which several thousand people were killed. This chamber, however, has received only a marginal treatment in the literature. One of the reasons for this marginality is that the technical operation of this chamber clashes with…

The “Report on Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen” (Prisoner’s Report) of 12 June 1945

One of the earliest postwar sources about Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is the so-called “Prisoner’s Report” which was compiled under the supervision of Hellmut Bock, a communist and former inmate of the camp. The first draft was ready by 7 May, just two weeks after the SS had left the camp. The German original of this…

The Number of Victims of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp (1936-1945)

Every year on 22 April the liberation of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp is duly commemorated. On this occasion, the press sometimes still mentions the figure of 100,000 victims who allegedly perished or were murdered at this camp. Although Sachsenhausen does not belong to the six “classic” extermination camps (Chelmno, Majdanek, Auschwitz, Belzec, Sobibor, Treblinka), the epithet…

The Report of the Soviet Extraordinary State Commission on the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

The “Extraordinary State Commission” (ESC, from Russian ЧГК, an acronym for Чрезычайная Государственная Комисссия) was created in November 1942 in order to detect and investigate “crimes perpetrated by the German Fascist Invaders” and the damage caused by them. After the Red Army had reconquered Soviet territories previously occupied by the Germans, this commission became very…

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…

End of content

End of content