Table of contents:
- It was originally built for Jews
- The blood was pumped out of the children to the last
- Seven thousand dead children
Video: World's Scariest Blood Bank: Salaspils Children's Concentration Camp
2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55
Salaspils is perhaps the creepiest of the Nazi concentration camps. During the three years of its existence, thousands of children were killed and tortured to death here. This was not just an extermination camp - it was a blood bank. She was pumped out of small prisoners, replenishing the stocks of German hospitals. Exhausted and starved to death, some of whom were not even five years old, were cynically viewed as living containers full of blood, or as objects of medical experiments.
It was originally built for Jews
The construction of the camp began in Latvia in October 1941. Nearby was the village of Salaspils - hence the name of the same name, which the camp received among the people, although it was officially called Kaiserwald. It was built by Jews, including those from the Riga ghetto.
The head of the Einsatzgroup A, Stahlecker, in his report to his superiors reported: “Since December 1941, a transport with Jews has been coming from the Reich […]. Of these, 20 thousand were sent to Riga […] All Jews are involved in the construction of the camp and […] this spring, all evacuated Jews who will survive the winter can be gathered in this camp”.
As SS General Jekeln later testified at the trial, two or three trains with Jews arrived at the concentration camp every week. Each has about a thousand people. “We have shot, presumably, about 87 thousand Jews who arrived in the Salaspils camp from other countries,” he said.
From the end of the spring of 1942, Latvian anti-fascists and captured Soviet soldiers, and then gypsies, began to be delivered to the Salaspils camp. Sometimes Soviet prisoners from other concentration camps were specially brought here to be shot.
The blood was pumped out of the children to the last
Although officially Latvia does not recognize the fact of such a mass murder of children in Salaspils, there are many eyewitness memories and other evidence of these well-known crimes.
Basically, kids were brought here from Belarus and the north-western regions of Russia - Pskov, Kalinin, Leningrad.
The "labor education camp" (as Salaspils was officially called in the documents) was actually a blood bank and a place for savage medical experiments. In this so-called "labor" camp, they kept two and three-year-old children, and even babies. Instead of a name, each child had a number stamped on a token.
In the more than three years of the concentration camp's existence, a total of three and a half thousand liters of children's blood have been pumped out. In most cases, she was taken until the child died. This blood was needed by SS officers who were recovering their health in hospitals.
The moment when a German in a white coat appeared in the barracks and laid out his medical instruments on the table was the most terrible for every little prisoner. The fiendish doctors ordered the children to lie down and stretch out their arms. Most of the children obediently obeyed, and those who refused were tied tightly to the table and blood was pumped out by force. Exhausted children, who looked already dying, were carried away from the barracks - as a rule, to be burned in the camp furnace or killed and thrown into a common ditch. The rest were left to be drawn again and again.
In addition, it is known that all kinds of poisons were tested on children in Salaspils, adding arsenic to their food, giving them lethal injections or sending prisoners to the gas chambers. Some of the experimental subjects were amputated by fascist doctors.
Seven thousand dead children
According to statistics, more than half of the 12 thousand Soviet children used in the Salaspils camp as donors died, but the Nazis did their best to hide the traces of the massacres.
It is known (again from the testimony of the fascists at the trial) that under the leadership of the Gestapo officer Blobel, many mass graves of prisoners were destroyed, including those of Salaspils. Noticing their tracks, the Nazis dug up graves and burned bodies. For such excavations, the labor of Jews was used, who were also killed and burned at the end of the work.
In the fall of 1944, during the offensive of Soviet troops, the Salaspils concentration camp (again, to cover up their tracks) was destroyed by the Nazis, and its personnel (Germans and Latvian policemen) was hastily evacuated.
According to the act of forensic examination of mass children's graves of the Salaspils concentration camp (28.04.1945), 632 bodies were found in 54 graves remaining on its territory. Of these, 114 babies are infants, 106 are children from one to three years old, 91 are from three to five years old, 117 are from three to eight …
In memory of the dead donor children and others killed in Salaspils after the war, a memorial was erected. It seems that the souls of little emaciated prisoners who gave their blood to fascist fanatics still hover in these places.
Read in continuation of the topic the material on how a retoucher photographer colored black and white photographs of the prisoners of Auschwitz.
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