During WWII, prisoners at Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp were forced to don workboots and run for hours around a rocky jogging track. The men (usually gays or jews) were given random pairs of shoes, with no regard for size, and forced at gunpoint to run the track (pictured above) in a bid to test the durability of various materials used to make workboots for soldiers. Those who couldn't last the distance were brutally bashed or killed by prison guards, and those who survived usually ended up with severe deformities.
It is just one of the many sad tales from behind the gates of Sachsenhausen, near Berlin, where about 30,000 inmates died from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition or pneumonia during the war. Others were executed or died as the result of brutal medical experimentation.
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