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Marking 80 years since the liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp by the Red Army, Russia’s FSB intelligence service has released classified documents from the interrogation of the camp’s former commandant, Anton Kaindl. The 39-page transcript, recorded in Berlin on December 20, 1946, contains Kaindl’s confessions about the "special procedures" implemented under his command.
Sachsenhausen, located about 30 kilometers north of Berlin, was established in 1936 by order of Heinrich Himmler and designed to be a "model camp," often staged for visits by foreign delegations. During World War II, more than 100,000 people—political dissidents, Jews, Roma and primarily Soviet prisoners of war—died there.
According to Kaindl's testimony, Sachsenhausen served as a detention site for political opponents and senior statesmen from France, Czechoslovakia, Austria and the Netherlands— including prime ministers and ministers — who were arrested after their countries were occupied by Germany. Jews and Roma were also imprisoned there.
Kaindl further disclosed that "highly secret operations for the extermination of people" were carried out at the camp, following orders from Himmler and other officials of the German government and intelligence services.
He said that between 1942 and 1945, under his direct leadership, the camp became a center for the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians.
"Camp inmates were killed in groups and individually by hanging on stationary and mobile gallows, shooting in a specially designated room, gassing, and poisoning — either by mixing toxins into food or by direct injection into the body," Kaindl described.
In his testimony, he added that "I admit that Sachsenhausen concentration camp and its many branches were converted by the Nazi authorities, under my direct supervision, into a site for the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and innocent Soviet civilians. Sachsenhausen was a place where painful and inhumane experiments were conducted on humans, often with fatal outcomes."
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The documents reveal that, a few days before Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union on June 22, 1941, the camp received a top-secret order to execute captured Red Army soldiers. Between 1942 and 1944, medical experiments also were conducted on inmates, under Himmler's orders and supervised by the camp's chief physician.
Kaindl was arrested in May 1945 by Allied forces, testified before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and was later handed over to Soviet authorities. After providing his detailed testimony, he was sentenced to forced labor at a coal mine in the Vorkuta labor camp near the Arctic Ocean. He died there on August 31, 1948. In his words, Sachsenhausen held "a special status among Nazi Germany’s death camps."