Death camps of the Soviets, 1945-1950 : from Sachsenhausen to Buchenwald /

After German unification, conditions within the former Soviet Zone were opened for the first time to systematic public discussion. Some 228 pages of eyewitness accounts are supplemented here by an appendix of photographs, personal documents, drawings, and writings of camp inmates. Former Hitler-Youth teenage boys and girls, former rank and file Nazi Party members, discharged members of German armed forces, and German civilians were arrested and groundlessly accused of anti-Soviet activities in 1945-46. All were harshly interrogated by Soviet NKVD authorities and sentenced to eight to 25 years imprisonment, in prison camps either in East Germany or in the USSR. Third degree interrogation methods and the extremely harsh conditions prevailing in those camps are described in this book, as are the mass graves in the vicinity of such camps as Oranienburg and Sachsenhausen in the former Soviet Zone of Germany. Inmate release times under various amnesties ranged from 1949 to 1953, but some of the inmates were not released until 1956. These accounts are interspersed with background commentary by Preissinger. They are accompanied by his pleas to punish East Germans who collaborated in the operation of these repressive activities, and to compensate materially the survivors who suffered so unjustly under the Soviet and East German regimes. All levels. B. V. Maciuika; University of Connecticut