LAMPE: We did indeed. First of all, these personages were always
surrounded by a complete staff, who went through the prison itself and
particularly adjoining blocks.
If you will allow me, I would like to go on with my description of the
murder of these 400 people from Sachsenhausen. I said that after
selecting the sick, the feeble and the older prisoners, Dachmeier, the
camp commander, gave orders that these men should be stripped entirely
naked in weather 18 degrees below zero. Several of them rapidly got
congestion of the lungs, but that did not seem fast enough for the SS.
Three times during the night these men were sent down to the
shower-baths; three times they were drenched for half an hour in
freezing water and then made to come up without being dried. In the
morning when the gangs went to work the corpses were strewn over the
ground. I must add that the last of them were finished off with blows
from an axe.
I now give the most positive testimony of an occurrence which can easily
be verified. Among those 400 men was a captain in the French cavalry,
Captain Dedionne, who today is a major in the Ministry of War. This
captain was among the 400. He owes his life to the fact that he hid
among the corpses and thus escaped the blows of the axe. When the
corpses were taken to the crematorium he managed to get away across the
camp, but not without having received a blow on the shoulder which has
left a mark for life.
He was caught again by the SS. What saved him was probably the fact that
the SS considered it very funny that a live man should emerge from a
heap of corpses. We took care of him, we helped him, and we brought him
back to France.