The truth behind the horrors of two eras

An infamous World War II concentration camp creates a dilemma for German historians

If fate had been kinder, Oranienburg would be an unremarkable town where on Sundays ladies would water their geraniums, the church bells toll and Berliners arrive with picnics for a day in the fresh air and pine trees.

The dice decided otherwise. Oranienburg's doom was to be intertwined with one of the most nightmarish episodes in human history. It became the site of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where the Nazis extinguished tens of thousands of lives.

Then, after Soviet fighters liberated the camp in April 1945, Sachsenhausen became a jail for the enemies of Stalin. At least 12,000 perished there, but the atrocities were masked for decades by East Germany's Communist regime and the woodlands may still hold macabre treasure.

For German historians, Sachsen-hausen presents a chance to reveal the truth about the camp, but with it comes a dilemma. What is the truth? How should it be interpreted? Which truth takes precedence?

Just 35km from Berlin, the triangular compound held more than 200,000 Jews, gypsies, gays, communists and Socialists between 1936 and 1945, as well as British, Polish and Soviet prisoners of war. Of those who entered the gates marked with the cynical slogan "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes You Free), only half may have survived.

Stalin's eldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili, died here. RAF officers recaptured after the "Great Escape" from Stalag Luft III mounted an unsuccessful operation to flee from Sachsenhausen.

More than 10,000 of those slaughtered were Soviet soldiers. Some were herded into a gas chamber designed to look like a shower room. Others were brought one by one into a bogus office where an SS guard wearing a white coat would tell the inmate to undress for a medical inspection. The prisoner had to stand against a wall, against a height gauge. Behind the wall would lurk another SS man with a pistol, who would reach through a slit and fire a shot into the base of the skull.

After death came erasure of the very proof that the individual had ever existed. Gold teeth were pulled, the bodies cremated and the ashes dumped. One track is known as "The Path of Bones" as it was so carpeted with human cinders. Only five years ago, archaeologists uncovered around four and a half tonnes of ashes near the former crematorium.

Within four months of liberating Sachsenhausen, the Soviets turned the camp into a prison of their own. From 1945 to 1950, "Special Camp No. 1" housed about 60,000 former Nazi officials, Social Democrats, people denounced out of envy or picked off the street, and many of the very young and very old dragooned into paramilitary service in the Third Reich's death throes. Mass graves uncovered in 1990 indicate more than 12,000 died, mainly from disease or malnutrition, although some bore traces of beatings.

The Stalinist regime of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) not only covered up these crimes. It carried out an act of historical vandalism. In 1952, the GDR blew up the SS execution station, leaving only its foundations, to clear space for a firing range for its paramilitary police. A couple of years later, facing seething opposition at home, the regime realised the camp could be a useful tool and established it as a memorial. Almost all the huts and other original buildings were then bulldozed, leaving the compound virtually empty.

At the apex of the camp triangle was set a 40m-high obelisk honouring only the political prisoners held by the Nazis, and massive statues of a Soviet soldier shepherding two inmates to freedom. Exhibitions portrayed West Germany as the Nazis' direct successor and East Germany as the "new humanist Germany". Displays dwelt overwhelmingly on anti-fascist fighters, virtually sidelining Jews, gypsies and gays. "The prisoners' camp was almost completely cleaned of its history," says the official guide to Sachsenhausen today.

Since German unification, the museum's new overseers have moved cautiously. They have installed a display highlighting the Nazis' perverted doctrines of race and anti-Semitism. They have also retained part of the old GDR exhibition, quietly showing how the truth was distorted for more than half a century. Several rebuilt huts show the grimness of life for inmates, especially Jews. A new centre sheds light on what happened between 1945 and 1950, alongside a garden, with flowers laid by descendants of Stalin's victims.

The Communist obelisk and giant statues remain. But the wind and rain have stained the stone and weathered the brick, and weeds grow between the steps where Soviet loyalists made their speeches and Communist Youths sang the Internationale. They are Ozymandian relics, testifying to a fading dictatorship.

The ensemble makes Sachen-hausen grim and thought-provoking. For history is typically written by the victor. But here, says Berlin historian Wilfried Rogasch, the museum has bravely preserved not only the past, but also how the past was presented, even if biased.

"As a result, rather as an archaeologist sieves through layers of earth, the visitor digs through successive layers of history to see the fuller picture of totalitarianism."

Among those held in Sachsenhausen

- Gottfried Graf von Bismarck-Schnhausen, a grandson of Chancellor Otto von Bismarck and an SS official who was aware of the preparations for a plot to assassinate Hitler.

- Reverend Martin Niemoeller, author of the poem First they came....

- Herschel Grynszpan, whose November 7, 1938 assassination of the German diplomat Ernst vom Rath served as a pretext for Kristallnacht, the anti-semitic pogrom.

- Georg Elser, an opponent of Nazism who attempted to kill Hitler on his own in 1938.

- Yakov Dzhugashvili, Stalin's eldest son was imprisoned and died.

- Antonn Zpotock, General Secretary of Communist Party of Czechoslovakia (later Prime Minister and President).

- Wing Commander Harry Day, Flight Lieutenants Bertram James and Sydney Dowse, RAF Pilots, who escaped during The Great Escape from Stalag Luft III. At Sachsenhausen with Jack Churchill and Major Johnnie Dodge escaped via a tunnel. All were recaptured and held in solitary confinement in the Death Cells (Station Z)