Marking 80 years since the liberation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, Russia’s FSB intelligence service has declassified haunting documents from the interrogation of the camp’s former commandant, Anton Kaindl — offering a chilling glimpse into the inner workings of one of Nazi Germany’s most notorious killing centers.

The 39-page transcript, recorded in Berlin on December 20, 1946, captures Kaindl’s grim confessions in his own words: an admission of “highly secret operations for the extermination of people,” carried out under his direct command.

Sachsenhausen, established in 1936 by order of Heinrich Himmler and designed as a “model camp” to impress visiting foreign delegations, became anything but. Located just 30 kilometers north of Berlin, the camp witnessed the deaths of more than 100,000 victims — political dissidents, Jews, Roma, and, above all, Soviet prisoners of war.

In his interrogation, Kaindl detailed how Sachsenhausen became a holding site for political opponents and high-ranking officials from France, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and the Netherlands — including prime ministers and ministers seized after Nazi occupations. Jews and Roma were imprisoned and killed in staggering numbers.

But it was the systemic extermination of Soviet prisoners that formed the heart of Kaindl’s confession. He described in brutal terms the methods of execution: inmates killed en masse by hanging on stationary and mobile gallows, shootings in a special death room, gassings, and poisonings — sometimes via tainted food, other times by direct injection.

“I admit,” Kaindl declared, “that Sachsenhausen concentration camp and its many branches were converted by the Nazi authorities, under my direct supervision, into a site for the mass extermination of Soviet prisoners of war and innocent Soviet civilians.”

The newly released documents also reveal that just days before Nazi Germany’s invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, Sachsenhausen received a top-secret directive to execute captured Red Army soldiers. Between 1942 and 1944, Himmler personally ordered inhumane medical experiments on inmates, supervised by the camp’s chief physician — experiments that often ended in agonizing death.

Kaindl was arrested in May 1945 by Allied forces, testified before the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, and was subsequently handed over to Soviet authorities. After giving his full testimony, he was sentenced to forced labor at the Vorkuta coal mines in the Arctic Circle, where he died on August 31, 1948.

In his own words, Sachsenhausen held “a special status among Nazi Germany’s death camps” — a stark reminder, even eight decades later, of the monstrous system that consumed millions and left scars across generations.

(YWN World Headquarters – NYC)