Services mark liberation of Sachsenhausen

Jerusalem Post ^ | Apr. 18, 2004 | ASSOCIATED PRESS

[yonif]

More than 500 people gathered at the Sachsenhausen memorial Sunday to mark the 59th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp.

Just outside Berlin, some 200,000 people - including political prisoners, captives from Poland, Soviet POWs as well as Jews - were interned at Sachsenhausen between 1936 and 1945, and tens of thousands died.

"The memory of the murdered must serve as a warning for coming generations," said former prisoner Zdzislaw Jasko, now vice president of the International Sachsenhausen Committee.

The camp, liberated April 22, 1945 by the Red Army, was then used by the Soviet occupiers to hold prisoners for several years until it was turned into a memorial.

A new visitor center was opened at the camp earlier this month, and the entrance to the site is to be moved in time for the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation, so that visitors pass through the same gate used by the prisoners.

Wilfried Grolig, speaking at the ceremony for Germany's Foreign Ministry, said such memorials are crucial in Germany.

"The memory of the crimes of national socialism is a fixed component of the German identity," he said.

Some 500 others attended a similar weekend service held at Ravensbrueck, a concentration camp for women 90 kilometers (55 miles) north of Berlin, which was liberated by the Soviets April 30, 1945.

More than 130,000 women and children and 20,000 men were imprisoned at Ravensbrueck, and tens of thousands died.

[Wally_Kalbacken]

liberated by the Soviets

You really have to pause at that phrasing, don't you?

[Yasotay]

Sachsenhausen was a sad place to visit right after the "Fall of the Wall". If I remember correctly, right after the Russians left in 1991/2 the Germans 'found' 10,000 bodies that the Soviets had killed after liberating it.