Fange nr. 62948 I Oranienburg - "Prisoner no. 62948 in Oranienburg", by Viktor Staerfelt published by Eget Forlag, Oslo 1945 - first edition. The harrowing story of a Norwegian prisoner who spent over two years in Oranienburg camp - one of the only existing prisoner testimonies from Oranienburg camp. Norwegian. Original cover with color illustration of an SS soldier with Oranienburg camp in the background. The book was also translated into Danish and English in 1946.
A rare and unique testimony of a Norwegian prisoner in Oranienburg camp, one of the few testimonies ever published about the horrors of the first camp established in Germany upon Hitler's rise to power in 1933. Viktor was arrested by the SS as a political opponent of the Nazi regime. Upon his arrival at the camp in March 1943, the body of one of the prisoners was hung in the center of the camp with a tag tied to his chest that read "Escaped and returned", and the new prisoners were forced to march around it for a whole day in order to instill the fear of the camp in them. "From the very beginning, the Nazis did everything to reduce the humanity within us as much as possible", he writes. The first task he and his fellow prisoners received was building a new crematorium in the camp for all those executed by shooting and other means whose bodies were discarded in the "quarantine" - a sterile area of the camp. Viktor describes the terrible suffering of the Jews in the camp - he also recounts the Nazi abuse of the Jewish prisoners in a sterile area where prisoners of other nations were forbidden from entering, and the many Jews that perished in the camp. He also documents the suffering of the Ukrainians and Russians. Most of them were sent for beatings immediately upon arrival, and there was hardly a prisoner who remained alive after more than one hundred lashes. The beatings were done by two men with a braided leather whip, the prisoners were beaten, hung, and their bodies thrown into the crematorium. He further describes the harsh torture undergone by thousands of prisoners in the camp hospital, the Nazis brought in patients with various diseases in order to infect other prisoners with those diseases when they thought they were being taken for treatment of their wounds in the hospital. After several months of forced labor, Viktor was transferred to maintenance work on the camp electricity and thus in effect saved his life. In March 1945, the Nazis announced that they were releasing all the Norwegian prisoners, the prisoners including Viktor were sent to Hamburg where Red Cross personnel waited for them, and two months later the war ended.
The Oranienburg Nazi concentration camp was located in the city of Oranienburg near Berlin. It was one of the first detention facilities established by the Nazis in Germany within weeks of their rise to power in 1933. Political opponents of the Nazis from the Berlin area were imprisoned there, mostly members of the Communist Party of Germany and Social Democrats, as well as homosexuals. Oranienburg served mainly as a camp for prisoners from Berlin and Brandenburg. The first prisoners to arrive there were 40 young Jews ages 13-20, who came from the Wolzig boarding school and were accused of Communist incitement. The camp played an important role in the Nazi regime's terror against the opposition in the early period of its establishment in Berlin. Political opponents who managed to flee Germany spread news of the horrors taking place at Oranienburg camp, and the Nazi propaganda machine was recruited to discredit them. After the practical liquidation of the SA on the Night of the Long Knives, Oranienburg camp passed into the hands of the SS, which decided to close it on July 13, 1934 and replaced it with the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
Extremely rare, the Norwegian edition published in 1945 does not appear in the global library catalog world cat. (One copy appears of the 1946 Norwegian edition held at the University of Chicago Library).
63 p. Very good condition.
