Germans bury Holocaust victims' Ashes

German officials buried the ashes of thousands of people killed in the Nazis' Sachsenhausen concentration camp Tuesday after they were discovered during building work at the site, the director of the camp memorial.

Archeologists last year found a layer of ashes up to 5 feet thick underneath a concrete memorial constructed near the camp's former crematorium by East Germany's former communist authorities. Director Guenter Morsch said it was impossible to establish the number or identities of the victims whose cremated remains were found, but he estimated "there are tens of thousands."

Some 200,000 people — including political prisoners, captives from Poland, Soviet POWs and Jews — were interned at Sachsenhausen, north of Berlin, between 1936 and 1945, and tens of thousands died.

"At the end of the Nazi regime, the SS tried to cover up the crimes committed at Sachsenhausen, and to do that they plowed the ashes of the dead into the ground over a wide area," burying them under a layer of earth, Morsch told reporters.

On March 29, officials buried the ashes in 150 urns at the Sachsenhausen site, he said. Each urn has the capacity to hold 66 pounds of ashes.

The burial comes ahead of commemorations next month marking the camp's April 22, 1945, liberation by the Red Army. Advancing Soviet forces found about 3,000 survivors, most of them old and sick.

Thousands of other prisoners died during the death marches that preceded Sachsenhausen's liberation as the SS evacuated most of the camp.

Memorial officials expect survivors to come to the April 17 anniversary commemoration, which German Foreign Minister Joschka Fischer also will attend.

Over recent years, a new visitor center has been opened at the camp and the site entrance has been moved so that visitors pass through the same gate used by the prisoners. The revamped memorial will be officially inaugurated at the anniversary ceremony.