The dark legacy of internment camps
ORANIENBURG: When Germany’s Nazi concentration camps were liberated 75 years ago at the end of World War II, many were immediately put back to use by a new oppressor - the Soviets. A little-known part of German history, the camps continue to haunt the country with victims still seeking justice more than seven decades on.
For years, the sites were “taboo or ignored”, said Alexander Latotzky, who was born almost 72 years ago in one such gulag. Officials in the Soviet occupation zone sought to “de-Nazify” junior members of the regime and members of the Hitler youth. In reality, prisoners were left to rot in “Schweigelager”, or “silence camps” - isolated from the outside world, abandoned and forced to live in terrible conditions. Disease was rampant and food scarce.
Between 1945 and 1950, more than 43,000 of the roughly 122,000 people held in the camps died from starvation or hypothermia, official figures show. “When I was a young man, I quickly stopped talking,” Latotzky said at the Sachsenhausen camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, where he spent the first two years of his life. It is partly because he was tired of being told “your mother must have been a huge Nazi if she was interned there.” “It’s absolutely untrue,” he said. The Soviets also sent political opponents to the camps - including people considered disruptive, like his mother Ursula.
Accused of spying
In spring 1946, Ursula, then 20, returned to her Berlin apartment and found her mother raped and strangled to death by “two men wearing Russian uniforms”. She reported the crime to the authorities, and a few weeks later was accused of spying. She was sentenced to 15 years and interned in a camp in Torgau, Saxony. She fell in love with a Ukrainian soldier, but their secret romance ended abruptly when she became pregnant. “My mother was sent to the Bautzen camp to give birth... and my father to Russia, to the gulag, a day before I was born,” Latotzky said.
Ursula and her baby were then transferred to Sachsenhausen. In 1950, the camp was dissolved and East Germany took charge of the detainees. Many of them, including Ursula, were sent to prison and separated from their children. And so began a nomadic life for Latotzky, shunted from family to family. He was nine when his mother, who said she would work for the East German secret police to get her son back, managed to get him across the border into West Berlin.