Historian Unearths Dark Secret: Stalinist ‘Death Forest’ : East Germany: As many as 65,000 people may have perished in Soviet camps. The disclosure marks the end of a nation’s silence about the terrors of its past.

You will find what you’re looking for over there, they said. The old farmers and foresters had known something for years, yet they kept silent. Until now.

Now, an East German historian claims he has uncovered a secret mass grave piled with thousands of men, women and children who perished in Stalinist internment camps on German soil as the Red Army advanced on Berlin in 1945.

“The death forest,” Dieter Krueger calls his grim discovery at the old Fuenfeichen camp site, on the outskirts of the northern town of Neubrandenburg.

As many as 65,000 people, many of them Nazi officers and soldiers, may have died in the 11 camps that the Soviets established at the end of the war, the East Berlin newspaper Berliner Zeitung said Saturday in reporting Krueger’s discovery.

The camps were often on the site of Nazi death camps, Krueger said, and ostensibly were to imprison Nazis, state officials, police officers and anyone else perceived as a security threat.

Western historians are also familiar with the stories.

“We know there were such camps,” said Karl Bracher, a prominent Bonn University historian and an authority on the Nazi era. “And we knew many died, not just Nazis but innocent people as well,” he told The Times in a telephone interview Saturday.

“But how many, where and when we never knew. East Germany always remained silent,” he said.

“Now, I think we’re going to be surprised.”

Any documents pertaining to the Stalinist camps on German soil were locked away in the Soviet Union, according to Krueger, and surviving locals were intimidated into silence.

That the secret of Fuenfeichen was revealed by an East Berlin newspaper underscores the country’s painful determination to finally confront its Stalinist past.

The Berliner Zeitung said that Krueger, an associate at the Neubrandenburg Historical Museum, followed a tip by two locals and discovered the mass grave March 13.

Bracher, the West German historian, said he had not heard of Krueger before now. The Berliner Zeitung did not elaborate on the East German’s credentials or his interest in the Stalinist camps.

The newspaper said that its reporter, Ottomar Harbauer, accompanied Krueger to the site.

“Next to each other, on top of each other, I saw skeletons lying in the sandy soil, barely more than a meter deep,” Harbauer wrote.

The paper also ran photographs showing at least two human skeletons in an excavated grave.

The report and photos would have been inconceivable under Communist censorship before East Germany’s peaceful revolution last November. The terror and crimes under Stalinism were not to be acknowledged, much less publicized.

According to Krueger, the dead were dumped in the mass grave by Polish prisoners who were also interned at Fuenfeichen, which was officially known as “Special Camp No. 9.”

The newspaper quoted a former prisoner, Guenter Arndt of Prenzlau, as saying the youngest prisoner at Fuenfeichen was 12 years old.

Most of the youngsters imprisoned at Fuenfeichen were members of the Hitler Youth between the ages of 15 and 17, the paper said.

“Internment camps after 1945 weren’t found only in the Soviet occupation zone,” Krueger was quoted as saying.

“Directive 38 from the Allied Control Council of Oct. 12, 1946, legalized them,” he said.

“People who posed a security risk for any of the occupying powers, as well as those who may have wanted to hinder the democratic new beginning of Germany, could be isolated.”

Stalinist terror in Germany was comparable to Nazi terror, Krueger said. “It hit the guilty and the innocent alike.”