A Day Full of Memories and Memorials, Part IV

At the end of this Saturday, I visited two less known former camp sites. At the Memorial Prison SA Papestrasse, you can get a good impression of what the earliest camps and prisons of the SA looked like. Its still very visible 'primitivity' is both its weakness and its strength. A guided tour here would probably add a lot to the learning experience, but unfortunately, such tours are given only once a month, in German.
Still, with some preparation, a visit to the site can be very meaningful. From there, I went to the Säule der Gefangenen, a memorial for the prisoners of the KZ-Aussenlager Lichtenfelde, a subcamp of Sachsenhausen. The only comprehensive information about this concentration camp I could find in German. 




On 1 April 1933, the Jewish surgeon and psychoanalyst Prof. Dr. Erich Simenauer (on the right in the picture) was arrested at the Kreuzberg Hospital and taken to Papestrasse. An SA man who was on duty and who was a former patient of the doctor, felt he owed him, and wrote "Do not maltreat" on the control slip, which apparently kept the doctor from being physically abused. Erich Simenauer was imprisoned for four weeks, managed to flee Germany, only to return in 1957.




A Stolperstein for Wilhelm Novak, a forced laborer who was a prisoner at the KZ Lichtenfelde. He was hanged - by means of strangling, not at a 'regular' gallow - in front of all the other prisoners, after a failed escape attempt.

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