Forgotten: The dark legacy of Soviet internment camps in Germany
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 told AFP 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.
"When I stepped off the train, I saw this small woman
running towards me, she couldn't stop crying, telling me that she was my
mother," said Latotzky.
Weakened by years of incarceration, Ursula died 10 years
later, aged 41.
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Latotzky visited the
Sachsenhausen camp with his family.
"All my childhood memories came flooding back and I
could not hold back the tears," he said.
"My mother and I spoke very little about our past. I
wanted to know what had happened to me."
- Mass graves -
The Soviet camps -- a forbidden topic in East Germany --
came to light after the discovery of mass graves harbouring their dead.
Former victims began to testify and archives were opened.
With the help of the Red Cross, Latotzky discovered that his
father was still alive and living in Russia where he was married with two
children.
In 2000 he went to visit him. "It was so emotional that
I blacked out. All I know is that we fell into each other's arms."
His father died four years later.
Latotzky obtained a list of around 100 people born in the
Soviet camps and set out to tell their story. Together, they are demanding
rehabilitation by the German state.
They are not alone. Many former prisoners, whether rightly
or wrongly convicted, are engaged in a controversial process of demanding recognition
of their suffering.
"How to honour victims and criminals at the same time
and how to deal with the issue of Nazi crimes in the face of Stalinist crimes
have been hot topics," historian Eva Ochs told AFP.
And "how much importance to give the memory of the
oppressive former GDR regime versus the crimes of National Socialism is also a
constant debate, even if no one is arguing that they are on the same
level," she said.
Today, visitors to the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen camps
learn about their double history.
The German government pays a pension to recognised victims,
but cannot rehabilitate them if they were convicted by a Soviet court "for
reasons of international law", the Ministry of Justice says.
Latotzky rejects that argument because he believes Germany
also played a part in his mother's shattered life and his own childhood drama.
They have received rehabilitation from Russia meanwhile.
"It doesn't bring any financial benefit," he said.
"I just want this great country to recognise the
injustices committed. Nothing more."
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