In September 1946, Soviet forensic experts carried out exhumations in the eastern German region of Brandenburg. In preparation for the Sachsenhausen trial, they investigated mass graves in which bodies of victims of the death march from the concentration camp had been buried during spring of 1945 or had been reburied by residents immediately after the war.1 Already in June and July 1945, research and tracing campaigns were carried out by local municipalities in the villages inmates had been forced to march through during the evacuation of the camp complex. Locations where inmates were shot or buried nearby were documented: “Highway trench of the Wittstocker Allee near Wulkow,” “gravel pit in Storbeck,” “gardens and fields in Rägelin,” “forest edge in Frankendorf,” “plot of land in the Pfefferberg forest,” “Schwedenschanze on Kuhburgberg”—to name just a few. Extraction teams dug up the corpses from the places where inmates had been murdered during the march and given a hasty burial a few months earlier. On the instructions of local Büros für Konzentrationäre Suchforschung [offices for concentration camp research], corpses were examined for items that could be used to identify them and then reburied in local or so-called Cemeteries of Honor.2

In my paper, I focus on the holocaust landscape, which Soviet medics investigated in Brandenburg in 1946. Using the example of the death march from Sachsenhausen, which took place within the province of northern Brandenburg in April 1945, I will analyze the history and immediate aftermath of the “shifting landscapes of the Holocaust,”3 as Tim Cole has termed these crimes. Like Cole, I will be using the term “Holocaust” here in a broader sense to describe the murder of concentration camp inmates during the death march, who were not only Jewish deportees but also sick and hopelessly exhausted prisoners. The areas crossed by the evacuating camps took three routes, following the retreating SS leaders from Oranienburg to Wittstock, thereby creating a “landscape of destroyed bodies,”4 as Paul Betts, Alon Confino, and Dirk Schumann have described Germany during the final weeks of the war, before Soviet forces advanced into the region. In April 1945, guards had left a trail of blood along the routes on which they evacuated the inmates: Roads, fields, forests, meadows, lakeshores, and hills of the much-vaunted northern landscape of Brandenburg became murder sites of the death marches. While Holocaust research has dealt with camps, ghettos, trains, and places of mass murder such as forests, dunes, or valleys mainly in Eastern Europe, a study of Holocaust landscapes in the so-called Altreich requires further research—especially regarding the “mobile camps”—not least, as Martin Clemens Winter has shown, because it raises the socio-spatial question of the surrounding communities.5

Cole’s important contribution to thinking spatially about the Holocaust serves as a starting point to examine the treatment of the murdered camp inmates within the Brandenburg landscape. Using the historical example of Brandenburg in 1945-1946, the article discusses the double meaning of tension between two notions of landscape: On the one hand, “landscape” as a place of genocidal crimes, full of corpses and other traces of extreme violence; on the other, “landscape” understood as Heimat, which implicated German bystanders when the war “overtook” the region. The paper focuses on three levels: mobile acts of violence (1) resulting in the creation of genocidal landscapes (2) and an overwriting of the Holocaust landscape in Brandenburg through reburials and “greening” as strategies for forgetting (3). But first, I will explain how the concept of “landscape” is used as an approach for historical analysis.

As a result of the spatial turn, specific spaces and places of the Holocaust have increasingly come into focus.6 In recent years, analyzing landscape as a specific socio-spatial construct has also intensified—both quantitatively and qualitatively.7 However, its analytical potential has so far received little attention in the historical study of the Holocaust.8 Cole uses landscape, for example, in the sense of a “Geography of the Holocaust”9:

“[The Holocaust] was also a place-making event that created new places—ghettos and camps—within the European landscape or reworked more familiar places—such as rivers and roads—into genocidal landscape.”10

“Landscape” thus refers in Cole’s approach to “thinking spatially or geographically about the Holocaust” by “[l]ocating the Holocaust in specific places [which] raises questions about the limits and possibilities of both German power and victim agency.”11

This is where we shall begin and take a further step by pointing out that from a social-constructivist or post-structuralist perspective, “landscape” is not conceived as an “objectively” existing physical object. Rather, it represents an individual construction that is “read into” or an imagined physical space based on social conventions.12 Understood in this way, “landscape” can be examined as a dynamic narrative which can be historicized. Moreover, individual landscape socialization cannot be understood as a continuous process, but instead takes place in phases in which different emotional, functional, aesthetic, and cognitive relationships are established.13 From this perspective, “landscape” is always subject to various political and social ways of attributing meaning.14 It therefore represents a politically loaded idea.15 With “landscape” as a category, it is thus possible to reflect on the processes of production and the question of how to allocate meaning to a space.16 Taking into account the plurality of different interests, which always lead to reinterpretations and re-evaluations of spaces, the struggle for competing systems of meaning, which is carried out through different practices of spatial appropriation, also arises—for example, in the allocation of meaning to places of memorialization.17 Depending on the way in which landscapes are “read,” they create, modify or organize relationships in the social world.18 Questioning the social and cultural practices involved in the process of creating meaning, which influence the various readings/textualities of landscapes, can become the subject of historical analysis, as the following summary of Nazi landscape ideology illustrates.

In Germany, “landscape” and Heimat have been closely related to an emotionally oriented meaning since the Romantic period: The local landscape was characterized by emotional connotations, from which a specific normative claim on “landscape” was derived. A physical space interpreted as a landscape “does not have to conform to ideal typical standards of beauty; rather, it must be familiar.”19 Literature and painting made a decisive contribution to the emotionally charged depiction of Heimat in the landscape. The term “Heimat” contains the Germanic word “heim”. It means “village” or “house”. It refers to the place where you live, where you are “at home”. For many people, Heimat means something familiar and beautiful. It is reminiscent of the place where they grew up, of their childhood, of their family, and of friends from their school days. Heimat serves as a place where people feel safe and secure.

Through the close interweaving of landscape and Heimat, the processes of constituting regions and nations as well as the relation to aliens were historically promoted.20 The link to fatherland, nation and Volksgemeinschaft culminated in a specific ideology of Heimat, which anchored a racialized “Heimat-Vaterland-Volks-Verknüpfung”21 [homeland-fatherland-people-connection]. “Heimaten im Exil”22 [Heimat in exile] or the “Zerstörung von Heimat”23 [destruction of Heimat] in concentration camps represent the dramatic flipside of this social orientation towards Heimat.24 Analogous to the Nazi demand for so-called racial hygiene, the ideal form of “landscape”, expressed in the ideologized terms of Heimat and Lebensraum, implies the categorical rejection of life classified as racially alien.25 In the ideology of “blood and soil,” the landscape’s distinctiveness represented a racialized concept of the German Reich that was to be transferred to the invaded Eastern European territories and culminated in the Holocaust.26 At the end of the war, genocidal activities were transferred to the territory of the Reich—including the Brandenburg region.

Drawing on Cole’s work, I have conceptualized the Brandenburg region as a Holocaust landscape. Concentration camp evacuation transports like the ones from Sachsenhausen were “place-making events” in relation to what he describes as “genocidal landscapes,” which in 1944/45 shifted from Nazi forced labour camps to German roads, forests, paths, and fields as well as to small towns, villages, barns, or forests.27 Death marches were part of the German evacuation policy, which aimed to deport the prisoners of the Nazi regime farther away while denying help for locals in many places.28 In some cases, the uncertain situation in rural areas that were on the verge of becoming theatres of war offered the evacuees an opportunity to flee and hide.29 But, due to the front, both spatial configurations—the battlefield as well as the area of evacuation—have in common the fact that landscape there was not open in all directions. Kurt Lewin already reflected on the spatial nature of the war landscape in his 1917 “Phenomenology of the Battlefield,” conceptualizing it as a boundary.30 According to Lewin, the peaceful landscape lined with villages, forests, and fields appears to the observer to be infinite, stretching evenly towards the horizon in all directions. However, as one approaches the front, the landscape suddenly appears to be limited on one side. The direction in which it can be moved is defined by the interpretation of the war situation. On the one hand, for the SS in Oranienburg in 1945, this meant that the only possible direction of retreat was to the north-west. For camp inmates, on the other hand, after escaping from violent and terrifying guards, the only way to escape from their torturers was by reaching the eastern front line or remaining in hiding until Allied units arrived was, which also meant they had to risk their own lives to survive. Germans threatened by persecution—such as Jews who until then had been protected by marriage to non-Jewish partners, or communists and socialists who had been arrested several times and deported to concentration camps—longed for the end of the war and sought to protect themselves from renewed threats of violence, whereas the situation of evacuation as well as war and occupation represented a loss of Heimat for parts of the population who were loyal to the regime and its ideology.31 But what image of Heimat linked to the landscape did the inhabitants of Brandenburg have?

Landscapes, like all spaces, are always relational and endowed with meaning. They require production in the sense of doing space.32 The sociocultural production of a Brandenburg landscape understood as Heimat can be traced back to the 19^th century. For example, in 1862-63, the famous German writer Theodor Fontane devoted several volumes to the landscape of the Brandenburg Market, which has contributed significantly to the region’s current popularity as a tourist destination.33 In addition to literature, the region also became the subject of visual arts in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. Painters such as Walter Leistikow travelled to the outskirts of Berlin to do extensive landscape studies in Brandenburg.

Praised as a particularly beautiful landscape because it was rich in forests, water, fields and pathways, the area around Berlin attracted city dwellers who spent their summer holidays or weekends in the Brandenburg countryside. At the same time, production in agriculture or of building materials such as bricks was oriented to the Prussian capital and shaped the image of the region as well.

During the 1930s, the SS also used the area around Berlin to set up its first newly-designed concentration camp on forest land in Sachsenhausen near Oranienburg.34 From 1936 onwards, almost every village in the vicinity encountered members of the guard units in restaurants and pubs or at beach resorts and public events. During the war, the holiday region was used for the evacuation of children and their mothers threatened by the air war in cities like Berlin and Hamburg, but also for the relocation of Berlin offices, particularly those of the SS/police, to the periphery. In 1945, when the German-Soviet theatre of war shifted to the province, the Brandenburg landscape was increasingly characterized by fighting and destruction; due to the intensification of the Allied air raids, the fields and forests looked more and more like a cratered landscape.35

At the end of the war in 1944/45, most of the satellite camps of Sachsenhausen were located along the Brandenburg railway lines. Alongside the Ruhr region and until the early 1940s thought to be beyond the reach of Allied air fleets, the region had become the second most important armaments center. Tens of thousands of inmates were engaged in extremely harsh forced labor for the German armaments industry or clearance work after Allied air raids bombed production sites. At the end of January 1945, when the SS at Sachsenhausen headquarters began evacuation measures in reaction to the advancement of the Soviet forces to the Oder River, it had more than 65,000 registered inmates—men, women and teenagers.36 Until the beginning of May, the evacuation process caused thousands of deaths in the subcamps, the main camp in particular, and on roads, in fields and forests, by lakes, and in villages and towns. As a theatre of evacuation, Brandenburg already represented a “landscape of destroyed bodies,”37 before the war itself—the Soviet advance and the German refusal to surrender—shifted gradually to Brandenburg and turned the region into “a land of death, ‘a Totenland’.”38

With the IKL/Amtsgruppe D (SS-WVHA), the headquarters organizing the deportations was in Oranienburg as well. In addition to the superior SS and police leader in Berlin, it issued orders for evacuations, which increasingly reduced the size of the concentration camp system from 1944 onwards.39 In 1945, more and more evacuations from other concentration camps reached Brandenburg. Deportation trains from Bergen-Belsen passed through the region on their way to Theresienstadt. Because Wehrmacht and frontline supplies were prioritized, deportation trains came to a standstill for days in many places. Deportees imprisoned in the “concentration camps on rails”40 or “travelling death camps”41 were left without supplies and died due to a shortage of food and water, the cold, or Western Allied air raids, to which they remained exposed while guards fled to safety.42 This happened, for example, at Segeletz railway station near Dreetz: An evacuation transport that had left Mittelbau-Dora near Nordhausen with Soviet, Polish, Italian, French, Dutch, and German deportees on April 5^th, waited there for three days and came under Allied fire. On the train were corpses of inmates who had died of hunger, disease, and maltreatment en route. Others died when the train in which they were squeezed together was attacked by British fighter planes because the pilots mistook it for a military transport. SS guards shot those injured by the air raid on sight; afterwards, they buried around 180 dead deportees in a pit near the railway station.43

The German refusal to mark these trains with a red cross to indicate that they were not military transports resulted in further deaths in Brandenburg. Allied fighter planes also fired on a deportation train, which was in Zernitz. The train had left Bergen-Belsen with Jewish deportees on February 26^th. They came from the Austauschlager [so-called exchange camp] and were on their way to Theresienstadt, where at the time Himmler used Jewish inmates as hostages to force negotiations with the Western Allies.44 More than 50 deportees died and numerous others were injured. Residents of Zernitz provided emergency care for the injured before they were deported elsewhere. Local factory workers and forced laborers had to dig a mass grave and bury the dead deportees.45

At the end of January 1945, as the Red Army reached the Oder River, the evacuation process in Sachsenhausen and Ravenbrück began.46 The start of the process, which lasted four months, thus falls into the second phase of concentration camp evacuations.47 It came to a standstill only a few days later at the beginning of February because Soviet forces were not yet able to break through the German lines at the Oder to proceed on their way to Berlin.48 At first, the SS in Sachsenhausen began liquidating satellite camps on January 23^rd. Categorized as “frontline threatened,” the commandant of Sachsenhausen ordered to empty them by deporting inmates back to the main camp or onward to other satellite camps.49 This was done by truck, train, suburban railway or on foot. Inmates who collapsed en route, (supposedly) resisted, or tried to escape were shot by the guards. Until the second half of April, the SS liquidated the satellite camps in stages. In response to the Soviet advance towards Berlin and the Elbe, the HSSPF Spree, August Heißmeyer, ordered the evacuation of the main camp on April 18^th.

Beginning on April 20^th, despite the fact that members of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) had tried to prevent the evacuation by taking over the camp,50 the commandant’s office of Sachsenhausen ordered the guards to evacuate the main camp. Approximately 30,000 inmates were deported from Oranienburg on an “Elendsmarsch”51 (march of the miserable)—as the survivor Gustav Borbe named the gruesome experience after the war—towards the north-west. Wittstock was the first destination. About 100 kilometers from Oranienburg, the columns of inmates and their guards came to a stop in the forest in Below close to the town for a few days. For most inmates, the torture continued until May and ended in the area around Parchim, Schwerin and Ludwigslust in Mecklenburg—there most of the guards fled in the direction of the Elbe towards the American forces, leaving the inmates behind.

At the improvised forest camp in Below, there was no water, food, or protection from the weather; inmates who were listed as Germans or could claim themselves as such had already been released by the commandant’s office. In Below, shortly before the departure from Brandenburg to Mecklenburg, the SS allowed the ICRC to distribute food to the hopelessly exhausted and starving inmates for the first time. Its delegate, Willy Pfister, was secretly documenting the situation photographically.

Due to the cruel circumstances created by the SS during the evacuation, about 1,000 deportees did not survive the Sachsenhausen death marches.52 As Francizek Federyga wrote in his testimony, “the SS was constantly shooting” and “there were no people in the villages, or they all hid out of fear. In the evening, we were placed in open spaces or abandoned buildings.”53 The areas that columns of concentration camp inmates passed through were thus fundamentally transformed and, as the former deportee Gino Pessani described them in 1950, they became a landscape of misery, torture, and murder.

The camp inmates from Sachsenhausen had to trudge along streets that were literally covered with bodies, according to the testimony of residents like Liselotte Oest, who left her hometown to flee from the Red Army and soldiers like Walter Schulz who retreated:

“The road to Löwenberg, from which refugee trains were to leave for Schleswig-Holstein, was completely jammed with cars, horse-drawn vehicles and every other possible means of transport, so that we only made slow progress. For entertainment we heard the constant thunder of guns and rifle fire. The road led along the wall of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, where we were greeted by a terrible sight. At short intervals lay many of the dead with their shaven heads against the wall. They were wearing striped suits and lay there horribly abandoned and thin. Nobody said anything; everyone was probably preoccupied with their own worries. I have never forgotten the sight.”54

“On this stretch of road, we passed many thousands of concentration camp prisoners flanked by SS guards on both sides as they marched northwards ahead of the Russians. The victims of the SS bandits lay in the ditches to the right and left. Eighteen concentration camp prisoners with cramped limbs lay shot dead by the road. Most of them were so exhausted that they could barely walk. There were also large groups of women among them.”55

On the same streets, residents left their Heimat, facing an uncertain future. Fear spread, not only because of the advancing Soviet units, but also because of the groups of liberated camp inmates who passed through the villages two weeks later on their way back to freedom and demanded accommodation and food after years of torture in German concentration camps. In April and Mai 1945, Nazi propaganda continued to have an effect. Instead of recognizing the inmates’ misery and acknowledging the injustices they had suffered, the German refugees and residents were frightened by the “marauding hordes”56 of liberated prisoners when they returned to their homes even before the German surrender and expressed their contempt and hatred in diaries.

“But now the streets: full of wagons, some of which had their radiators smashed in, abandoned by shortsighted owners in a hopeless flight, their horses unhitched and much more. In their midst, the people who had been liberated from the concentration camps had already descended like swarms of locusts, plundering and robbing. Everything – coffee, butter, flour, meat, paper – lay jumbled in a heap and hundreds of even more trampling people were hoarding and grabbing. Worst of all were the many foreigners who immediately waved their foreign flags and were given bicycles, horses and carts by the Americans, who had stolen them from our Germans a few minutes earlier.”57

The Holocaust landscape of the death trains and marches in Brandenburg included the rapid burial of corpses to remove all traces of the crimes. Following the death march from Oranienburg to Wittstock, as shown in the photographs also taken by Pfister, guards often left behind the corpses of the inmates they had murdered by a shot in the head, covering them with only jackets or blankets to hide them from direct view.

When asked in August 1945, the newly appointed mayor of the municipality of Teschendorf in the district of Neuruppin, described the procedure as follows: “At the initiative of the former mayor and in the interest of rapid removal, the corpses were taken to a bomb crater about two kilometers away and buried.”58 After the death march heading for Wittstock had left the campgrounds in Oranienburg, guards forced a convoy of inmates to march through the village and the inmates they shot were left by the roadside in and near Teschendorf. On the instructions of the Nazi mayor, the corpses were collected and buried outside the village immediately after the death march had passed by to ensure that when the Red Army arrived, no one would associate the crime with the village.

In Wulfersdorf, guards also left corpses behind. One deportee who had been shot was buried in a private garden and two others were buried afterwards by residents on private farmland. All documents found on the murder victims were taken by the local Nazi head of office. By August 1945, those documents, which could have been used for identification, were deemed “lost.”59 In other places, such as the village of Gadow, those “shot in the neighborhood... were buried by guards or inmates.”60 Walter Gozell also reported this procedure after he had survived the death march: “A ‘gravedigger team’ went back along the road to bury the comrades who had been shot on the spot.”61 On orders from the SS officer in charge, in Rossow deportees had to bury murdered inmates. Other corpses were buried by residents at the cemetery and in the village. As the mayor wrote in August 1945, “Under the pressure of the imminent Russian invasion and the outrage associated with it, no identification marks were kept.”62

However, the location of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp complex in the region was not the only source of violence, which was already present in many small towns—and visible to members of the population—before the inmates were forcibly driven out of the camp to Wittstock in front of everyone’s eyes.63 Violence had in fact become firmly anchored in the region when political opponents were deported to the early SA camps, which existed in the Brandenburg province, including Oranienburg in 1933/34, as well as during the pogroms in 1938 and the deportation of Jewish citizens from Neuruppin or Lindow in the 1940s, even though the Jewish population there was comparatively small.64 The evacuation of Sachsenhausen in the spring of 1945 simply revealed in a previously unknown way how the SS and their subordinate guards committed the mass murder to which Jews and other racially persecuted people as well as the seriously ill and the politically persecuted had been subjected for years.

As we described at the beginning of this article, the search for victims of the death marches and trains in Brandenburg began as early as the summer of 1945. The same applied to Mecklenburg, as many deportees had to walk further north-west from Wittstock before being liberated by Soviet or American soldiers between May 2 and 6. After the war, foreign deportees sought repatriation as soon as possible. German survivors of Sachsenhausen settled in the many towns and villages in Brandenburg and Mecklenburg where they had been taken to recover. There they often assumed official positions and set up organizational offices for the persecuted run by the association Opfer des Faschismus65 (OdF, Victims of Fascism). In the summer of 1945, they were mainly concerned with issuing orders for the supervision of the identification, exhumation and reburial of the corpses of their fellow prisoners.66

The main committee of the OdF sent letters to all mayors. To find out where the graves of camp inmates and other Nazi victims were located, written reports had to be compiled.67 Murder cases involving the population had to be reported as well.68 In particular, the police were required to carry out excavations and investigate sites such as the mass grave near the Segeletz railway station in Dreetz.69 Immediately after the war, a Büro für Konzentrationäre Suchforschung (Office for Tracing Research) was also set up in Neuruppin. It was assigned to identify graves in which murdered concentration camp inmates had been hastily buried and had designated “corpse recovery” teams at its disposal. For example, in June and July 1945, on the instructions of the OdF, the Neuruppin District Administrator, investigated 64 corpses of former inmates.70 The research campaign in individual communes such as Altruppin found three corpses of former inmates in one collective and two individual graves at the local cemetery. The village of Klosterheide reported four more corpses of inmates who had been murdered by their guards on the road between Lindow and Dierberg. Two inmates’ graves were discovered in Linow—including the corpse of a woman. Between Teschendorf and Löwenberg, 21 concentration camp deportees were buried in a field. There were two unmarked graves in Nietwerder and eight corpses of murdered deportees in Schönberg.71 Herzsprung reported nine victims.72

The communities were asked to carry out dignified burials. They were instructed to exhume the dead and had to look for things that would make their identification possible. In the presence of the villagers, the dead were then to be ceremonially buried in coffins in every local cemetery. In the future, care was supposed to be taken of the graves.73 In Teschendorf, the mayor had 14 corpses dug up, examined for identifying marks and transferred to the cemetery, where he had “found a worthy resting place[...]” for them. The only information we have about the personnel involved in the investigation and reburial was provided by a local teacher who was responsible for keeping minutes.74 No papers were found, but numbers attached to the clothing of the inmates ensured the identity of ten of the corpses. The minutes included a note of the exact clothing and the color of the triangle as well as whatever else the prisoners might have had with them, such as soap. In Teschendorf, the reburial at the cemetery had already taken place in August. The erection of a memorial cross and the maintenance of the grave were still in the planning stage at this time.75

In Wulfersdorf, on the other hand, priority was given to harvest work.76 The fact that the reburial and the ceremony were to take place there later points to the lack of manpower in the countryside due to the war and the fact that the Soviet Military Administration in Germany (SMAD) was focusing on ensuring nutrition at the time.77 Accordingly, after the decay of the corpses had progressed, their exhumation and reburial took place in Wulfersdorf in November. The victims were given a grave in front of the church. In January 1946, a memorial was underway.78 The 64 corpses of murdered camp inmates identified at the beginning of August by the tracing research office in Neuruppin were dug up in the communities where they were found, loaded onto a horse-drawn cart and reburied in a section of the town’s cemetery known as the Cemetery of Honor. Nine more reburials were to follow as soon as one of the vehicles needed for harvesting work became available again.79 Jewish rules for the treatment of dead, which forbid reburial, were not respected in any of the exhumations.

In the summer of 1945, the community of Herzsprung reported ten deaths that had occurred during or after the death march.80 According to the report of the new mayor, nine unidentified victims were exhumed in August and solemnly reburied in a mass grave in the cemetery in the presence of the local population. The numbers of two former inmates, one red triangle, and a “P” for Polish were found on victims’ corpses. At the time, there was already a grave in the cemetery where Ewald Förster, a German concentration camp inmate from Wuppertal who died immediately after the war, had been buried. Only one year later, the statement that “[t]he graves [...] are kept in order by the community”81 was no longer true: In September 1946, the mass grave was in such an unfavorable condition that the Parchim District Committee of the OdF, which was researching information about victims, felt compelled to submit a complaint and request that the grave be moved to the Parchim Cemetery of Honor.82 Obviously, what had happened in Herzsprung in April 1945 was on its way to being forgotten—not least because some members of the local population had been involved in the crimes. Förster, for example, was not taken in by “local residents” during his escape from the death march, as was claimed in 1945, but by a woman who had fled to the village herself due to the war.83 Polish inmates who were hiding from the guards in a barn in the village were denounced by a resident. On the instructions and possibly even with the participation of the local Nazi leader, they were shot afterwards in front of the population. In 1946, however, this was not yet the focus of police or legal investigations. Instead, until investigations were conducted by the Ministry for State Security in 1955, collective silence and denial about the murders committed on the spot bonded this local community together.84

In preparation for the Sachsenhausen Trial, forensic commissions of the SMAD again examined the graves in the districts of Neuruppin and Waren (Mecklenburg) in September 1946. The aim was to investigate whether the corpses were those of murdered camp inmates from Sachsenhausen. The exact cause of death and the method of murder had to be determined.85 When the mass graves in Teschendorf (Neuruppin District) and Grabow (Waren District) were opened, the Commission of Forensic Experts took photographs. In one mass grave in Teschendorf, the medics found 15 dead, 14 of whom had been shot in the head. The skeletons and teeth revealed that the dead were male and about 30 years old when they were murdered. The medics also documented the careless handling of the corpses when residents had reburied them in the previous year:

“At a depth of over 1.5 meters, the remains of bodies were discovered lying there in disarray, with only one in a wooden coffin. The remains consist of disorganized human bones with a small amount of soft textile attached. An examination of the skulls revealed that they had been fractured […].”

The shattering of the skulls had occurred “as a result of being shot through with firearms [...].” A reference to the wooden clogs found with the corpses served to confirm that the badly decomposed corpses were former concentration camp prisoners.86 The commission also documented the condition of the mass grave and the erection of a red wooden cross with the inscription “Opfer des Faschismus April 1945”87 [Victims of Fascism, April 1945]—a typical inscription on monuments in the Soviet occupation and later eastern zone of Germany. The prosecutors, who were oriented towards anti-fascism—whether Jewish or non-Jewish—viewed the camp from the universalist perspective of the anti-fascist struggle; later on, during the Cold War, they were mostly oriented towards the East and followed Soviet ideas in designing memorials.88 On Soviet monuments, the identity of the victims was not mentioned. In official Soviet discourse, the Nazi regime was referred to as “fascist”; the word “Nazism” was not used. Instead, the Nazi regime was presented as one of the manifestations of global fascism, itself an offshoot of capitalism.

In my paper, I have shown how the term “Holocaust Landscape” can be used to describe the Brandenburg region at the end of the war. Due to the death marches in the final stage of the Holocaust and for the first time during the Nazi regime, the landscape in Brandenburg was littered with corpses. In April 1945, coming across murdered and unburied dead people became an everyday occurrence. Even before the front arrived, following the death marches and trains, corpses became a ubiquitous part of the landscape in this region, where the last battles for the German capital took place between German and Soviet units and were bitterly fought. Residents had to deal with anonymous corpses left on streets. Today we do not know whether they were checking to see if those who had been struck down by SS bullets were still alive. But the residents who were involved in murders like those in Herzsprung and forced laborers were compelled to do so quickly, burying the corpses where they had been killed or hiding them at once. To do so, they also used existing excavations such as gravel pits or bomb craters.89 Like the reburials after the war, this cannot be considered a dignified burial. As we noted earlier, Jewish rules regarding the treatment of dead were not taken into account, nor were rabbis invited to attend. What effects did the exhumation and reburial process in Brandenburg have on the memory of the crime that survivors referred to as death marches?

The way in which corpses were dealt with in 1945 was primarily driven by the desire to make them disappear before the Soviet forces arrived and to cover up the traces of the crimes committed against the deportees. The evacuation on foot was immediately followed by the German-Soviet battle, which unleashed unprecedented levels of violence against the civilian population, particularly in Brandenburg—from both the German and especially the Soviet side.90 This was the first time the local Holocaust landscape was overwritten: The shootings en route remained without any commemorative marker. In the course of the exhumations and reburials in 1945/46, precise knowledge of mass executions sites as well as graves was lost. Instead, traces of the battles became the visible part of the palimpsest made up of the various acts of violence that had taken place there, and as Richard Bessel points out, the encounter with their own dead “reinforce[d] Germans’ sense of their own victimhood.”91 It enabled the implicated German population to take their minds off what had happened immediately before and focus on the experience of violence without acknowledging that it had previously been brought into the world by Germany. While, on the one hand, previously persecuted and deported Germans returned to their hometowns in Brandenburg and former camp inmates settled in the region where they had been liberated and made an attempt—often in vain—to recover and get back on their feet, the collapse of the Nazi regime, the brutal end of the war, the accompanying destruction, and the subsequent Soviet occupation led, on the hand, to fundamental changes for those loyal to the Nazi regime and its ideology, who interpreted those events as a loss of Heimat.

If we consider, as we stated at the outset, that landscape socialization cannot be understood as a continuous process, but rather takes place in phases in which various emotional, functional, aesthetic, and cognitive relationships are established, the period of the end of the war shaped the understanding of landscape in Brandenburg in two different ways. After the German surrender, the post-Holocaust landscape in Brandenburg was subject to a reorganization of the graves as well as tensions between remembrance and Entinnerung92 [dememorialization]. The two paintings by Leistikow and Pessani show the contrasting views that residents in the villages had of the Brandenburg landscape immediately after the war: On one side, survivors asked that the murdered be given dignified graves and demanded that the crimes be punished. Soviet occupation authorities dealt with the latter in 1946, when they put members of the SS on trial in Berlin. On the other side, because of their own involvement in the crimes or in covering up the traces, parts of the civilian population abandoned the graves to oblivion. The way the corpses of murdered camp inmates were treated in 1945/46 also reflects how the guards as well as most of the residents looked at them: with disinterest and as examples of the racialized idea of Volksschädling [public nuisance or enemies of the people] or at least as prisoners and thus responsible for the situation, but hardly ever as victims of terror and arbitrary justice. This attests to the continuation of Nazi ideology and to the fact that such dehumanization had an effect beyond death, while survivors who settled in the area as well as the victims’ organizations campaigned for dignified burial sites and a memorialization of their fellow sufferers. Moreover, the homogenization of the victims labelled as “victims of fascism” masked the heterogenous stories of suffering, which differed considerably with regard, for example, to Jewish deportees from Hungary, Soviet prisoners of war or German inmates imprisoned as political prisoners.

By reburying bodies and establishing central burial and memorial sites, the historical shape of the Holocaust landscape with its many locations was rendered invisible. As a result, it became impossible to see how close the German population in Brandenburg in 1945 had come to the crime of concentration camp imprisonment and deportations. It also concealed the fact that residents themselves were sometimes involved in the cruel procedure of deportation and the “disappearance” of corpses. Reburial meant that the corpses disappeared from private ground and could no longer be linked to the residents. This is how the pre-war idea of landscape in Brandenburg could be restored. Even though the search for victims was started immediately after the war by German and international organizations, the employees of the memorial sites in Below and Oranienburg are still researching for mass graves to this day. This is also why it is still difficult to determine the exact number and—more importantly—the names of all the victims.