16/06/2009

Former Nazi labor camp consecrated as Jewish cemetery

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1093364.html

A Nazi labor camp near Berlin where SS guards massacred more than one thousand inmates over 60 years ago was consecrated Tuesday as a Jewish cemetery.

The Lieberose camp, a satellite of the larger Sachsenhausen concentration camp north of Berlin, was open from 1943 to February 1945. During that time SS officers shot and killed 1,300 sick and invalid Jewish inmates.

It was above all a place of suffering for Jewish prisoners that the Nazis brought from Auschwitz or directly from their home regions, said Jorst Seferenz, spokesman for the Foundation for Brandenburg Memorials, referring to the infamous death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Bodies were first discovered at a grave near Lieberose in 1958, and almost 600 were found in 1971.

During the Cold War, East German officials took some of the bodies to Dresden for examination. Some were later interred in Frankfurt an der Oder, a town on the present-day border with Poland, while others were cremated and returned to the Lieberose site, some 100 kilometers (62 miles) southeast of Berlin.