Self-organization
of the prisoners and the liberation of the camp
Note: The
photos have not yet been released for the Internet under copyright law! French prisoners
photograph the Falkensee concentration camp, which had just been liberated two
days earlier. The photo from April 28, 1945 was published in memoirs by former
French prisoners on April 26, 1973. Source: Archive
Museum Falkensee
To organize the
concentration camps, the SS used so-called, often German, prisoner
functionaries, who took on a wide variety of tasks in the camp and were
supposed to implement the orders of the SS. In the course of the war, the
shortage of personnel in the SS increased and the importance of these prisoners
increased. Increasingly, political prisoners were placed in such positions and
were thus able to exert a greater influence on camp life. An independent
illegal structure of the prisoners was the international camp committee, which
was led in Falkensee first by Christian Mahler and later by Max Reimann, both
German communists. In April 1945, she and her comrades-in-arms made a decisive
contribution to the liberation of the camp without death or bloodshed. When the
Sachsenhausen main camp gave the order for the Falkensee camp to be closed,
they convinced the commander, Ernst Kannenberg, not to evacuate the camp. Days
before, the Falkensee prisoners had seen very weak, sick and suffering people
in the camp who were stopping in Falkensee on their way from Lieberose to
Oranienburg. The horror among the prisoners in Falkensee was great. As chairman
of the camp committee, Max Reimann tried to get in touch with the Red Army so
that the camp would not become a theater of war. On April 26, 1945,
the first Soviet soldiers arrived at the camp. That same day, the prisoner at
the time, Bruno Schultz, began his diary: "Thursday, April 26, 1945 at
noon. 11:30 a.m. free to leave the camp after the camp guards have left their
posts on the 25th had left."
This was the
decision of the International Camp Committee based on a memoir by former
prisoner Gustav Buttgereit from 1975. Source: Archive
Museum Falkensee Character letter
from former prisoners of April 24, 1945 for the last Falkensee camp commander
Ernst Kannenberg. Among the signatories are Max Reimann, member of the
International Camp Committee and later KPD Chairman of the Federal Republic of
Germany, and the French inmate doctor Dr. Breitman. A notarized copy is shown. Source: Brandenburg
State Main Archive, Rep. 161, Object 4, ZB 2969 Bruno Schultz's
diary, first page open: On April 26, 1945, the day the camp was liberated,
Bruno Schultz began writing his diary. Source: Archive
Museum Falkensee
