The FSB declassified information about experiments on prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp

The Federal Security Service (FSB) has released new declassified archival documents telling about the numerous experiments that the Nazis carried out on prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The relevant materials appeared on the agency's website on April 22.

Sachsenhausen was located near Berlin and began operations in 1936. According to the former camp commandant, SS Standartenfuhrer Anton Kaindl, it occupied a special position among the "death camps" of Nazi Germany — it contained the most serious political opponents of fascism, prominent statesmen from many European countries. In April 1945, he was liberated by the advanced units of the 1st Belorussian Front.

Kaindl was arrested by the Allied forces in May of the same year. During the interrogation, he confessed to the mass killings of Soviet prisoners of war and civilians and told about the experiments conducted on them.

"Prisoners of the camp were exterminated by hanging on mechanized stationary and portable gallows, shot in a room specially equipped for this purpose, gassed in a gas chamber, and finally poisoned by mixing poisons into food and injecting them into the human body," said the former camp commandant.

According to him, Sachsenhausen was the site of the most secret and responsible extermination operations, carried out on the personal instructions of leading figures of the German government. In 1947, Kaindl was sentenced to life imprisonment with hard labor, and in 1948 he died in the Vorkuta camp of the USSR Ministry of Internal Affairs.

Who brought life: how the Red Army liberated Sachsenhausen

The Nazi death factory has been operating since 1936

On April 11, the FSB declassified documents about the mass killings at the Treblinka concentration camp, which was liberated by units of the 65th Army of the first Belorussian Front in August 1944. Over 2 million people were killed in Treblinka during the Second World War.