Leseprobe

G E R M A N Y | O R A N I E N B U R G / S A C H S E N H A U S E N 1 3 5 The legitimacy of these accusations remains unclear in many cases, but it can be assumed that the arrests were often arbitrary and the confessions extorted under torture. Most of the prisoners were German men. The 7,500 foreigners—mainly Russians, Ukrainians and Poles—included numerous Russian emi- grants persecuted by the Soviet secret services, Soviet prisoners of war, former forced labourers and soldiers of the Red Army, but also mem- bers of Vlasov’s army. The camp administra- tion kept them in separate barracks isolated from the other prisoners. Most Russian emi- grants and citizens of the Soviet Union were only held in Sachsenhausen for a few months until they were transported to the penal camps of the Soviet Gulag or executed in the Soviet Union. Between 1945 and 1950, the Soviet occu­ pying power held a total of 60,000 prisoners in Sachsenhausen. At least 12,000 prisoners died there from malnutrition, cold and disease. Unlike their equivalents in the Soviet Union, the special camps were not labour camps, former officers of the German Wehrmacht who had been released from Western Allied captivity and re-imprisoned by the NKVD upon entering the Soviet Occupation Zone and were finally deported via Sachsenhausen to the Soviet Union for forced labour. On 16 and 17 September 1946, the NKVD transferred the first prisoners convicted by a Soviet Military Tribunal (SMT) to the Sachsen­ hausen special camp. These came from the Mecklenburg prisons of Alt-Strelitz and Güstrow. In total, more than 16,500 SMT convicts were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen. Most convictions were based on the infamous section 58 of the 1927 Criminal Code of the Russian Soviet Feder­ ative Socialist Republic. The range of grounds for detention found in Soviet records is broad: espionage, possession of weapons, anti-So- viet propaganda, “werewolf” activity (resis­ tance behind enemy lines), illegal group for- mation, Nazi crimes, theft, economic crimes, traffic accidents with property damage and personal injury, complicity, and many more.