Last known surviving Nazi concentration camp guard, 99, ‘who helped to murder 3,300’ at notorious WW2 prison known for gas chambers and horrifying medical experiments is ruled unfit to face trial
Built in 1936 to house high-ranking political prisoners, Sachsenhausen is the camp where the Nazis perfected murder methods that were scaled up and used to murder millions in larger and more infamous camps like Auschwitz.
Early executions in Sachsenhausen were carried out by placing prisoners in a room and asking them to stand against a wall to have their height measured, before shooting them in the neck through a hidden trap door.
This proved effective but time-consuming, so the Nazis began piling people into a ditch where they were shot or hanged.
While this proved better at killing large numbers of people, it caused prisoners to panic and made the process more difficult.
It was after these trials that Nazi executioners came up with the idea of using poison gas, with some of the first experiments at Sachsenhausen being carried out using small rooms or vans.
In 1945, Soviet troops liberated the unguarded, weak and sick prisoners who were too ill to participate in the forced death march and had been left behind a day earlier (photo: some prisoners in the camp)
Like most other camps, Sachsenhausen was used to house and murder Jews, homosexuals and other ‘undesirables’, but it also housed a number of notable politicians and political figures.
Among the prisoners were Yakov Dzhugashvili, the eldest son of Joseph Stalin, Paul Reynaud, the penultimate Prime Minister of France, Francisco Largo Caballero, Prime Minister of the Second Spanish Republic, and the wife and children of the Crown Prince of Bavaria.
It functioned as a Nazi camp until 1945, when it was liberated by the Soviets.
During that time, some 200,000 prisoners were sent there, about half of whom died – partly due to executions, but also from illness and overwork.
After the war, the camp continued to function, this time as a Soviet prison, and continued to house political prisoners.
About 60,000 people were imprisoned there by the Red Army, including former Nazis, Russians who had collaborated with them and anti-communist opponents of Stalin’s regime.
One of the men in charge of the camp at that time was Roman Rudenko, the Soviet Union’s chief prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials.
It is believed that approximately 12,000 people died at Sachsenhausen under the Soviets before the camp was finally closed in 1950.
After it closed, excavations were carried out to try to recover the remains of some of those who died there.
In total, the bodies of approximately 12,500 victims were recovered – mainly children, adolescents and the elderly.