Horrifying secrets of Nazi concentration camp’s human experiments including hurling grenades into a packed room are revealed in trove of Soviet documents

By HARRY HOWARD, HISTORY EDITOR

Published: 13:15 BST, 28 April 2025 | Updated: 13:46 BST, 28 April 2025

Testimony detailing the horrifying experiments the Nazis carried out on prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp prisoners been revealed 80 years on.

The commandant of the notorious camp admitted to overseeing tests that included throwing a new kind of hand grenade into a room filled with inmates to test it, declassified Soviet files released by Russia’s FSB security agency reveal.

Anton Kaindl also told how prisoners were ‘exterminated’ using a ‘mobile gallows’, gas chambers, putting poison in their food and by ‘injecting them… with syringes’.

Sachsenhausen was, according to his testimony obtained after his arrest by Allied forces, a ‘place of mass murder of Soviet prisoners of war and peaceful Soviet citizens.’

The camp was set up in Oranienburg north of Berlin in 1936 to house political prisoners, among them the son of Russian leader Josef Stalin. 

Testimony detailing the horrifying experiments the Nazis carried out on prisoners at Sachsenhausen concentration camp prisoners been revealed 80 years on

Jews, captured Soviet troops and others were also held there, and tens of thousands of inmates died before the camp’s liberation in April 1945. 

It was at Sachsenhausen that the Nazis perfected their killing techniques, before rolling out the methods to other camps, including Auschwitz in occupied Poland.

Sachsenhausen’s commandant was Anton Kaindl, who was interrogated by the Russians

Kaindl was arrested in May 1945 and was a witness at the Nuremberg trials, before being handed over to Soviet authorities.

Their 39-page record of his interrogation has been released by the FSB, Israel National News and ynetnews reported.

He said: ‘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.’

The Nazi admitted Sachsenhausen ‘was a place of suffering and inhumane experiments on humans, which often had lethal results’.

The grenade experiment was also revealed in his testimony. 

Kaindl went on to be sentenced to life in prison and hard labour. He died in a Russian forced labour camp in 1948.

Prisoners during a roll call at Sachsenhausen concentration camp

Sachsenhausen operated from 1936 until 1945 

The ‘Work Sets You Free’ sign at the Sachsenhausen concentration camp gates, pictured ahead of Holocaust Remembrance Day in 2019

Sachsenhausen was a training ground for Auschwitz’ monstrous commandant, Rudolf Höss.

There, Höss was ordered to shoot a fellow SS officer who had allowed a prisoner to say goodbye to his family before being arrested. 

The prisoner then escaped. 

After the war, Sachsenhausen was turned into a Soviet prison housing political inmates.

Some 60,000 people were locked up there by the Red Army, including former Nazis, Russian who had collaborated with them, and anti-Communist opponents of Stalin’s regime.

Last December, a German court ruled that a former SS guard at Sachsenhausen could face trial for allegedly helping with the ‘insidious killings’ of thousands of prisoners.

Gregor Formanek, then 100, had been deemed unfit to stand trial due to his advanced age and alleged poor mental and physical condition.

But a higher regional court overturned this decision.

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Horrifying secrets of Nazi concentration camp’s human experiments including hurling grenades into a packed room are revealed in trove of Soviet documents

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