Sachsenburg was a Nazi concentration camp in eastern Germany

Germany

Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...

, located in Frankenberg

Frankenberg, Saxony

Frankenberg is a town in the district of Mittelsachsen, in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. It is situated on the river Zschopau, northeast of Chemnitz.It was the site of the Nazi concentration camp Sachsenburg....

, Saxony

Saxony

The Free State of Saxony is a landlocked state of Germany, contingent with Brandenburg, Saxony Anhalt, Thuringia, Bavaria, the Czech Republic and Poland. It is the tenth-largest German state in area, with of Germany's sixteen states....

, near Chemnitz

Chemnitz

Chemnitz is the third-largest city of the Free State of Saxony, Germany. Chemnitz is an independent city which is not part of any county and seat of the government region Direktionsbezirk Chemnitz. Located in the northern foothills of the Ore Mountains, it is a part of the Saxon triangle...

.http://museen.smwk.sachsen.de/00000368.html Along with Lichtenburg

Lichtenburg (concentration camp)

Lichtenburg was a Nazi concentration camp, housed in a Renaissance castle in Prettin, near Wittenberg in eastern Germany. Along with Sachsenburg, it was among the first to be built by the Nazis, and was operated by the SS from 1933 to 1939. It held as many as 2000 male prisoners from 1933 to 1937...

, it was among the first to be built by the Nazis, and operated by the SS from 1933 to 1937. The camp was an abandoned four-story textile mill which was renovated in May 1933 to serve as a "protective custody" facility for dissidents such as Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses

Jehovah's Witnesses is a millenarian restorationist Christian denomination with nontrinitarian beliefs distinct from mainstream Christianity. The religion reports worldwide membership of over 7 million adherents involved in evangelism, convention attendance of over 12 million, and annual...

, who opposed the Nazi regime.

Sachsenburg was the first concentration camp in which SS used colored triangles sewn onto clothing, as well as armbands, to identify categories of prisoners. Details about the operation of Sachsenburg, held in 17 files (each containing several hundred SS reports) by the International Tracing Service

International Tracing Service

The International Tracing Service in Bad Arolsen, Germany, is the internationally governed archive whose task it is to document the fate of millions of civilian victims of Nazi Germany. The documents in the ITS archives include original records from concentration camps, details of forced labour,...

, only became available to researchers in late 2006.

Indians

The Spanish author Emilio Calderón claims in his novel "La Bailarina y el Inglés" that in the town of Frankenberg the Nazis had a broadcasting facility that helped Subhas Chandra Bose, the assigned leader of India after the Endsieg, to propagate his ideological views to his countrymen all over the globe (see: La Bailarina y el Inglés by Emilio Calderón, ed. Grupo Planeta, Barcelona 2009). Bose's ideas were very much akin to those of the very Nazis, because the latter regarded the Indians an early offspring of the Arian Race. What is more, the "Corps Freies Indien" and other Indian pro-independence organizations are supposed to have been centered there.

This is made more precise by the Lexikon der Deutschen Wehrmacht: the authors explain in their respective article that Frankenberg was only the second location of the Indian Legion, as they call it, after it had been founded. Later it was moved to another place near Dresden because Frankenberg was too small a military training ground to host a unit that was meant to grow up to the size of two battalions.

External links

• Article about Sachsenburg (2006)