Paul Sakowski

Paul Sakowski (born February 1, 1920 in Breslau ; †  July 28, 2006 near Leipzig ) was a German prisoner functionary in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp , who was referred to as the executioner of Sachsenhausen .

Life

Sakowski grew up in a communist working-class family in Wroclaw. His parents were members of the KPD , and at the age of six he himself belonged to the Young Spartakus Bund. His father Arthur Sakowski was arrested and charged in 1930 for high treason. After the conviction of these had in his sentence penitentiary settle. Son Paul grew up afterwards in poor conditions with his mother. As a result of the seizure of power by the National Socialists Arthur Sakowski was immediately into the concentration camp Esterwegen transferred and in 1935 released from the prison camp.

After he had completed his eight years of elementary school in January 1934, Paul Sakowski contributed something to the livelihood of the small family as an errand boy. In December 1934 the fourteen-year- old was arrested by Gestapo members after a house search in his parents' apartment. After brutal interrogations in which he was asked about his father's alleged connections to KPD members, Paul Sakowski was finally released. In order to join the International Brigades during the Spanish Civil War , Sakowski and a friend tried to illegally cross the German-Czechoslovak border, and were caught and taken into custody.

In April 1938 Sakowski was transferred to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and at that time was the youngest prisoner in the camp. In August 1939 Sakowski was tortured by hanging from stakes by the head of the detention area, Kurt Eccarius , and was then placed in dark detention for ten weeks . The background for this measure was the assistance for an abused prisoner who was reported. After the dark confinement, Sakowski became a killer in the detention area and was responsible for serving food there. Among the prisoners he brought food to there were Georg Elser , Martin Niemöller and Herschel Grynszpan . In March 1941, Sakowski had to watch Eccarius and another SS man shoot a fellow prisoner. Since he passed on this and was then betrayed, he was placed in solitary confinement for half a year . Sakowski was taken out of the cell by Eccarius on September 3, 1941 and, together with fellow inmate Wilhelm Böhm, led to the roll call square in front of the assembled prisoners of the concentration camp . There Sakowski and fellow inmate Böhm were victims of a mock execution that was stopped at the last moment.

Immediately afterwards, at the behest of SS officers, Sakowski and Böhm were taken to a warehouse in which captured Red Army soldiers were murdered from behind with a shot in the head. Sakowski and Böhm were forced to drag hundreds of bodies out of the execution room. Even after that, Sakowski and Böhm were still employed as corpse bearers and corpse burners when transports of captured Red Army soldiers reached Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Sakowski and Böhm fell ill due to a typhus infection caused by lice . Böhm later died as a result of the infection, while Sakowski survived. Sakowski later stated that between September 1941 and September 1943 he participated in the cremation of 30,000 prisoner corpses. Sakowski and Böhm were also forced to carry out executions of fellow prisoners. According to Sakowski's later statements, Bohm is said to have carried out the executions on the gallows, while he himself stated that he only removed the bodies from the gallows .

After the liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Sakowski came to Berlin , where in June 1945 he took part in a liberation ceremony for former Sachsenhausen prisoners in the Berlin Radio House . There he was reported to the police as a former executioner of Sachsenhausen by fellow inmates and arrested. Shortly afterwards he was handed over to the Soviet NKVD and brutally interrogated. Sakowski was finally indicted in the Sachsenhausen trial on October 23, 1947 with members of the Sachsenhausen camp SS before a Soviet military court. Among them were Eccarius and Gustav Sorge , who had mistreated Sakowski with 25 lashes with the stick when he was sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Like all the other defendants, Sakowski was found guilty and sentenced to life imprisonment with compulsory hard labor . The convicts had been accused of murdering Red Army soldiers and of being partly responsible for the inhumane camp conditions. After the verdict was pronounced, he was taken to the Vorkuta des Gulag labor camp with the other convicts . There, too, he had to bury the bodies of deceased inmates. Mid-1950s Sakowski was from the Soviet Union in the GDR transferred, where he worked until 1970 in prison Bautzen , Brandenburg and the prison labor camp Berlin-Hohenschönhausen was imprisoned. During his imprisonment he wrote on the orders of the Stasi , the diary of Paul Sakowski. After his release from prison he married, his wife later died. Sakowski spent the last years of his life under a different name in a retirement home near Leipzig. He died on July 28, 2006.

In the German film Executioner. Death has a face , Jens Becker and Gunnar Dedio portray seven former executioners, including Sakowski.

literature

• Annette Leo: Paul Sakowski, the hangman of Sachsenhausen . In: Friedhelm Boll, Annette Kaminsky (eds.): Memorial work and oral history. Biographical contributions to the persecution in two dictatorships . Berlin-Verlag Spitz, Berlin 1999, ISBN 3-8305-0033-5 , pp. 113-128.

Web links

• Dirk Böttcher: You don't feel anything , in: Berliner Zeitung of March 5, 2002, p. 5
• Berliner Zeitung, article manipulation or forgery? dated March 21, 2002
• Image by Paul Sakowski

Individual evidence

1. ^ Wolfgang Schorlau : Sachsenhausen, Siberia, Bautzen. Only today does Paul Sakowski live in freedom - The story of the so-called executioner of Sachsenhausen, who was imprisoned for 32 years , in: Weekend supplement of the Stuttgarter Zeitung of March 19, 2005
2. ↑ Executioner - Revenge Without Feeling / Jens Becker's documentary about the last executioners in Europe , accessed on October 8, 2018.