Sachsenhausen special camp

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Entrance to the museum of the special camp No. 7 / No. 1

The Sachsenhausen special camp (first special camp no.7 , from 1948 special camp no.1 ) was a Soviet special camp in Germany from 1945 to 1950 . It was partially located on the site of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp in the Sandhausen district of the city of Oranienburg .

The inmates of the special camps were detained without a verdict, because those convicted by the Soviet military tribunals (SMT) did not come to the special camps. However, since there was also a camp for SMT convicts on the premises, this is occasionally mixed up in the argument.

Today the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum is located on the site of the former Sachsenhausen special camp. The facility sees itself as a place of remembrance and learning as well as a modern contemporary history museum . It follows a decentralized overall concept in order to make the history tangible for the visitor in the authentic places. In August 2001, the exhibition Special Camp No. 7 / No. 1 opened.

1945 to 1950

The brick barracks of the special camp No. 7 for the SMT convicts
Memorial stone at the forest cemetery for the special camp No. 7 in the forest between Oranienburg and Schmachtenhagen
Information column at a mass grave at the forest cemetery

After the last of the liberated concentration camp prisoners left the site in the summer of 1945, the camp was used as a special camp by the Soviet military administration from August 1945 . This began with the transfer of 150 prisoners to the Soviet special camp No. 7 Weesow near Werneuchen . Apart from the crematorium and the extermination facility, almost all of the camp buildings, especially the wooden barracks, the camp prison and the farm buildings, were put back into operation. Towards the end of 1945 the camp was fully occupied again (12,000 people). The following year, up to 16,000 people were temporarily locked in the camp. About 2,000 female prisoners lived in a separate area of ​​the camp.

In the former special camp for Allied prisoners of war known as “Zone II”, there were initially Soviet citizens waiting to be returned to the Soviet Union.

The former protective custody camp, known as "Zone I", was intended for German civilians (special camp inmates) without a final conviction. The special camp was almost completely isolated from the outside world. Relatives were not informed of the whereabouts and fate of those detained. Those imprisoned without legal basis and under inhuman conditions were former members of the NSDAP , social democrats , many young people as well as arbitrarily denounced and politically unpopular people who feared opposition to the socialist - communist system . Even former German Wehrmacht officers and foreigners belonged to it. The camp was not a labor camp . The prisoners suffered from forced inactivity, constant hunger, cold, vermin and secondary illnesses that had not been medically treated. They died by the thousands and were thrown in mass graves and buried. Of the approximately 60,000 prisoners between 1945 and 1950, around 12,000 died of malnutrition, illness, and mental and physical exhaustion.

Former camp inmate Erika Riemann , who was imprisoned there at the age of 14 for painting a Stalin portrait with lipstick, reports u. a. of mock executions during which she and others were taken to a shower room in the former concentration camp . The guards there threatened that the prisoners would be done the same thing as earlier Jewish victims , because the showers would not come from water, but gas .

From 1948, board games, sports as well as newspapers and the transmission of radio programs were allowed at times. In the summer of 1948, around 5,000 prisoners were released from Special Camp No. 7. After the Mühlberg special camp was closed in 1948 , Sachsenhausen was the No. 1 special camp, the largest of three special camps in the Soviet occupation zone. There was also a central prison for convicted women on the same site with a low sentence of 15 years and less.

In the spring of 1950, a few months after the founding of the GDR, the last camps were closed. About 8,000 prisoners were released from special camp No. 1, and a smaller group was transported to the Soviet Union. The NKVD transferred 5,500 prisoners to the GDR authorities. Among them were 1,119 women and about 30 of the children born in the camp - so-called "Landeskinder" - who were transferred to the GDR women's penal institution in Hoheneck / Stollberg . The injustice of the continued use of the National Socialist concentration camps by the Soviet occupying power and the associated repeated painful deaths of thousands of people was concealed or played down by the SED regime . Some of the survivors were brought before a GDR court in 1950 in the notorious Waldheim trials and held for many years in GDR prisons such as Waldheim and Bautzen .

Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum

Since 1993, the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum on the site of the former Sachsenhausen special camp has been responsible for exhibitions and research on the history of the camp. The main focus of the institution's content ranges from the history of the Oranienburg concentration camp, various aspects of the history of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp to the Soviet special camp and the history of the memorial itself.

Known internees

Known prisoners (SMT convicts)

literature

  • Gerhard Finn: The political prisoners in the Soviet zone. 1945-1958. Verlag Wissenschaft und Politik, Cologne 1989, ISBN 3-8046-8725-3 (reprint [of the edition] Ilmgauverlag, Pfaffenhofen 1960, OCLC 11012847 ).
  • Gerhard Finn: doing nothing is murder. Combat group against inhumanity - KgU. Berlin-Nikolassee 1958. Westkreuz-Verlag, Berlin / Bad Münstereifel 2000, ISBN 3-929592-54-1 .
  • Jan von Flocken , Michael Klonovsky : Stalin's camp in Germany 1945–1950. Documentation, witness reports. Ullstein, Berlin a. a. 1991; 4th ed., Ibid., ISBN 3-550-07488-3 .
  • Günter Agde : Sachsenhausen near Berlin. Special camp No. 7, 1945–1950. Cash register, documents and studies (= construction pocket books. Volume 7003: Document and essay ). Aufbau-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Berlin 1994, ISBN 3-7466-7003-9 .
  • Sergej Mironenko, Lutz Niethammer , Alexander von Plato (eds.): Soviet special camps in Germany 1945 to 1950. Akademie-Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-05-003258-8 :
    • Volume 1: Studies and Reports. Edited by Alexander von Plato. ISBN 3-05-002531-X .
    • Volume 2: Soviet documents on camp policy. Single and edit by Ralf Possekel. ISBN 3-05-003244-8 .
  • Annette Leo : Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and Special Camp No. 7. In: Günther Heydemann , Heinrich Oberreuter (Ed.): Dictatorships in Germany - Comparative Aspects. Structures, institutions and behavior (= publication series of the Federal Agency for Political Education. Volume 398). Federal Agency for Civic Education , Bonn 2003, ISBN 3-89331-482-2 , p. 249 ff.
  • Günter Morsch, Ines Reich (ed.): Soviet Special Camp No. 7, No. 1 in Sachsenhausen (1945–1950). = Soviet Special Camp No. 7, No. 1 in Sachsenhausen (1945–1950). Catalog of the exhibition at the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum (= series of publications by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation . Volume 14). Metropol, Berlin 2005, ISBN 3-938690-13-5 (text in German and English).
  • Petra Haustein: History in Dissent. The disputes over the Sachsenhausen memorial after the end of the GDR. Leipziger Universitäts-Verlag, Leipzig 2006, ISBN 3-86583-150-8 (Zugl .: Berlin, Freie Univ., Modified diss., 2005).
  • Günter Morsch : Sachsenhausen - The “concentration camp near the Reich capital” (foundation and expansion) (= research contributions and materials from the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation. Volume 10). Metropol Verlag, Berlin 2014, ISBN 978-3-86331-170-4 .

Web links

Commons : Special camp No. 7 Sachsenhausen  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Friedhelm Brennecke: "The SS felt welcome here". In: Oranienburger Generalanzeiger . May 30, 2014, accessed on January 18, 2015 : “The archives are full of files and documents from the Dachau and Buchenwald concentration camps . In the Sachsenhausen concentration camp alone, the sources are more than meager. That is why there is still a lack of a monograph on the history of the concentration camp of a new type. "
  2. ↑ "The SMT convicts did not belong to the special camp inmates and were also housed completely isolated." Quoted from: Sergej Mironenko, Lutz Niethammer, Alexander v. Plato (Ed.): Soviet special camps in Germany 1945 to 1950. Volume 1: Studies and reports. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-05-002531-X .
  3. ↑ Special camp in the SBZ. Memorials with a “double past”. Edited by Peter Reif-Spirek, Bodo Ritscher in collaboration with the Buchenwald Memorial and the State Center for Political Education Thuringia . Ch. Links Verlag, Berlin, ISBN 3-86153-193-3 (proceedings for the conference at the Buchenwald Memorial, September 16-18, 1998).
  4. ^ Kerstin Fischer: My lost world of Communism. BBC News . March 13, 2009.
  5. ^ "In 1948, by order of the Soviet occupying power, all mothers with children from NKVD camps and prisons were brought together in the NKVD camp in Sachsenhausen. How many women from Jamlitz , Buchenwald , Mühlberg , Torgau , Ketschendorf or Fünfeichen arrived in Sachsenhausen and fought for their survival with their babies in the prisoner barracks is still unknown today. Not even how many lost this fight. ” Born behind bars. Children's fates in the post-war period. Film by Hans-Dieter Rutsch ( memento from September 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: phoenix.de. Phoenix , September 25, 2016, accessed December 28, 2017 (movie description).
  6. ↑ “At least thirty children arrived on February 11, 1950, together with their mothers and over a thousand women on a transport from the NKVD camp in Sachsenhausen in the completely overcrowded women's prison in Hoheneck. Newborns were only allowed to stay with their mothers for a few months before they were separated and deported or hidden in children's homes in the GDR. None of these children were previously registered in the civil registry. Notes in prison records exist only by chance, if at all. [...] The traces of the guards, the People's Police and the State Security have been covered too thoroughly . ” Born behind bars. Children's fates in the post-war period. Film by Hans-Dieter Rutsch ( memento from September 29, 2016 in the Internet Archive ). In: phoenix.de. Phoenix , September 25, 2016, accessed December 28, 2017 (movie description).
  7. ↑ Alexander Latotzky (ed.): Childhood behind barbed wire, mothers with children in Soviet special camps. Forum Verlag Leipzig, Leipzig 2001, ISBN 3-931801-26-8 .

Coordinates: 52 ° 45 ′ 57 ″  N , 13 ° 15 ′ 51 ″  E