Bottled Note Found in German Concentration Camp After 60 Years

Bloomberg Terminal | 4/17/03 | Friederike Truemper

[BunnySlippers]

Bottled Note Found in German Concentration Camp After 60 Years

Berlin, April 17 (Bloomberg) -- A worker found a bottled message by two inmates of a German concentration camp almost 60 years after it was hidden in a wall.

The bottled note was sealed into a hollow space in a wall of the Sachsenhausen camp north of Berlin, the site's memorial center said. It was secured with a wire in the wall's cavity and broke when a builder tore down the wall as part of measures to build a visitor center.

``Homewards I want to go again,'' inmate Anton E. wrote in the message dated April 19, 1944, seven years after he was put into the camp. The Polish captive Tadeuzs Witkowski noted that he had been in Sachsenhausen since July 1940, the center said in a faxed statement. He also stated his identification number.

The Nazi regime in Germany used the camps to kill six million European Jews as well as numerous resistance fighters and members of political parties opposing Adolf Hitler's rule. The prisoners were murdered in gas chambers upon their arrival at 29 camps such as Ausschwitz, Dachau and Bergen-Belsen, or were worked and starved to death in more than 160 labor camps.

About 18 million people were imprisoned in such camps during the Nazi regime of which 11 million died, estimates show.

A Nazi court in 1934 convicted Anton E., a member of Germany's communist KPD party, to four years in prison for resisting the regime. He was transferred later to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp where he was liberated in 1945.

``My spirit is unbroken. It'll have to get better soon,'' wrote Anton E. who was born in 1902 in Frechen close to Cologne and died in the early 1980's. His note was passed on to his widow, the memorial center said.

Witkowksi was deported from his hometown of Rzeszow to Sachsenhausen in 1940 at the age of 20 because he had attended an illegal learning group after his high school was closed by German troops that had occupied Poland.

He joined Anton E.'s construction unit in the camp and together they built the wall that would separate the building to make room for a slaughterhouse.

Witkowksi was freed by U.S. troops close to the northern town of Schwerin in 1945 while on a so-called death march the Nazis had organized in an attempt to dissolve the concentration camps before the arrival of allied troops that were already approaching.

``Tadeuzs then went into the American zone and emigrated to the U.S. or Canada,'' the memorial center quoted Zdzislaw Jasko, a fellow prisoner of Anton E. and Witkowski, as saying.

The memorial center will exhibit the piece of paper with one message scribbled on the front and one on the back in the visitor center that will open at the end of the year.

-Friederike Truemper in the Berlin bureau
-0- (BN ) Apr/17/2003 13:25 GMT

[linear]

Cool. A message in a bottle, floating on the sea of time.

[The G Man]

Wow. Thats something.

[dts32041]

What the Iraqi looters didn't steal this note?

Oops wrong thread.

[cynicom]

Germans love Saddam, they have not learned much from their old days. What a sorry race.

[wideawake]

Fascinating. I wonder if Anton E. realized the irony of being a stalwart supporter of Stalin's death camps while imprisoned in one of Hitler's death camps.

[FreePaul]

...estimates show.

Qualifiers like this really enhance the credibility of a statement. Otherwise an interesting article.

[TopQuark]

That is a mystery of the human mind: as Solzhenitsin described so well, even in the Stalin's concentration camps many communists continued to justify that regime and... the camps.

And we want the American liberals to admit past mistakes!

[alisasny]

I find the date April, 19 very interesting.

[Sam's Army]

"only a couple of camps -- in Poland -- are even claimed, by knowledgeable historians today, to have used gas chambers as a method of mass execution."

Please attempt to discredit the Holocaust elsewhere.

[Valin]

And we want the American liberals to admit past mistakes!


Don't hold your breath.
Being leftist means never having to say your sorry..or wrong.

[Cachelot]

No historian believes this today: there were no extermination camps (i.e., camps using gas chambers for mass executions

Uh-oh. Hang out at IHR, do you? And have a summer residence over at LibertyForum, perhaps?

[gridlock]

Coming right up, isn't it?

[gridlock]

Gee, I guess the NAZIs were just misunderstood, and all of those missing people are just on extended holiday in the South of France.

It is posts like yours that give FR a bad name.

[ZULU]

"No historian believes this today: there were no extermination camps (i.e., camps using gas chambers for mass executions) on German soil and only a couple of camps -- in Poland -- are even claimed, by knowledgeable historians today, to have used gas chambers as a method of mass execution."

The moon is made of green cheese and dead meat creates flies.

[Petruchio]

Please don't poot in a crowded elevator.

[xm177e2]

The Nazi regime in Germany used the camps to kill six million European Jews

The camps were used to kill five million Jews, an additional million were killed by the mobile Einsatzgruppen. And a lot of other people (gypsies, gays, communists, resisters, etc.) were also killed or put in concentration camps.