The Russian FSB has published a segment from the investigation of the commandant of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where approximately 100,000 people were murdered.
The camp, established in 1936 under the direction of Heinrich Himmler, just weeks after the Nazis came to power, was initially used mainly for the detention of regime opponents, but later, among others, Russian prisoners of war and Jews were imprisoned there.
In May 1945, the camp commander, Anton Klein, was arrested by Allied forces. Initially, he was a witness in the Nuremberg trials and later transferred to the Soviet authorities.
By the end of 1946, Klein was transferred to the Soviets along with 15 other workers from the concentration camp.
In his investigation, according to the investigation transcripts revealed this week, Klein detailed the atrocities his men committed on his orders against the camp prisoners: "I admit that the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, with its many branches under my direct command, became a place of mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war and peaceful Soviet citizens."
"During my time as commander of Sachsenhausen, from 1942 to 1945, the camp prisoners were exterminated in groups and individually by hanging on a mobile gallows, shooting in a room specially equipped for executions, killing with gas in a gas chamber, as well as by mixing poisons into food and injecting them into the human body with syringes."
He also stated that "the Sachsenhausen camp was a place of suffering and inhumane experiments on humans, which often had lethal results."
In his investigation, he mentioned that among the experiments conducted on Soviet prisoners, there was a trial of a new hand grenade, which was conducted by placing prisoners in a room and throwing the grenade into the room to examine the effects of the new grenade's operation.
After his investigation, he was sentenced to life imprisonment and hard labor. Klein died in 1948 in a gulag (forced labor camp) in Vorkuta in the Soviet Union.