It has been 78 years since the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp, in the last days of the Second World War in Europe.
A Welsh soldier will become the only British prisoner to testify at a future war crimes trial.
Sergeant Evan Llewelyn Edwards, known as Vin, was a professional soldier in the Welsh Regiment.
But for almost eight months, from the end of 1943, he was a prisoner in a notorious German camp.
Vin, then thirty-three, was regularly beaten and lost almost half of his total body weight before he was finally transferred to another location.
His testimony about the abuse at the US-sponsored war crimes trial - held in the same camp a few months after his liberation - helped convict some of the culprits.
In the end, 36 guards and other camp officials were sentenced to death.
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What was Dachau?
- Dachau, near Munich, was the first concentration camp established by the Nazis in 1933
- It is believed that more than 200.000 people were imprisoned there
- At first, political prisoners, communists and other "enemies of the state" were kept there, but later also German Jews
- More than 40.000 people died there before American troops liberated it in 1945.
- Hundreds died as they were forced to march south as American forces approached
- At the war crimes trial, 42 camp officials were found guilty, and 36 of them were sentenced to death. Of them, 23 were hanged in May 1946
- Some deaths were also caused by medical experiments, and Dr. Klaus Schilling was still working on his records in the hours before the execution.
"Teffy" (the Welshman) Edwards, as his colleagues inevitably called him, was first captured by the Italians in North Africa in February 1942, but managed to escape several times - though never for long.
During one of the longest periods on the run through Italy, he stole a bicycle before being recaptured.
And then he escaped through a window with two other RAF officers while being transferred to Germany by train in September 1943.
He was recaptured while trying to reach Allied troops alone a month later on another train.
Vina was betrayed by an Italian civilian he befriended, who gave him civilian clothes.
He was interrogated and beaten by German officers for insolence, before being put on a transport with around 200 other prisoners.
Vin was transferred to Dachau on another train, this time in handcuffs - which had to be removed from his hands when he arrived at the camp.
The new arrivals were forced to stand naked in the rain for three hours, after which they were given ice baths and hot showers, which led to the death of 20 people from pneumonia.
He was made to wear a red triangle on his clothes, the sign of a political prisoner.
The conditions were appalling, and Vin risked torture to steal a stump of cabbage to add to the meager portion of the soup.
"The follow-ups were bad, one day one loaf of bread for eight people, another day one loaf of bread for 12 people, a quarter of a liter of potato soup or four dirty potatoes," he told the trial.
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"They took me to the building and beat me"
He described the abuse in detail in his official statement: “I never forgot that I was British, but sometimes hunger would cloud my mind and I would grab anything.
"I was transferred to the hospital in November, but I saw and heard so many prisoners being injected with fevers and other things that I was glad to be released."
"Then I had to work in a quarry. The capo on duty was a prisoner called Nol, a bastard of a man who used his boots and fists quite liberally.
"He hated the English, reported me to the SS, saying I was lazy. Because of this, I was taken to the building and beaten.
"Then I was handcuffed by my left hand and hung from the hip on the ceiling, which lasted about twenty minutes and the pain was unbearable. That same evening, my hands were tied behind my back and attached to a hook on the wall.
"In both cases, my feet were twenty centimeters off the ground. After they put me down, I had to do exercises."
Vin also described how many prisoners were dying and how desperate he was.
"At that time, ten crematorium ovens were working day and night while prisoners threw themselves on the electric wires that surrounded the camp, and the hospital was constantly turning out many corpses. What would one more corpse mean, nothing."
Vin tried to convince the camp administration that he was an active British soldier, but was called a liar by Gestapo officer Johann Kik and "beaten in shifts" by him and the SS officers.
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He staggered out the next morning barely conscious at 7.30:15 in front of the camp hospital with XNUMX knocked out teeth and cuts on his head and over his left eye.
"My wounds were stitched up with a regular needle and thread," he recalled.
Finally, Vin was transferred from the camp to nearby Munich, but not before further interrogation and being held in a "bad" cell, still in the clothes he had been wearing since his capture in Italy.
He was then transferred to Salzburg, Austria, where an old woman took pity on him as he was led barefoot through the snow to the train station and gave him a pair of old shoes.
A rare act of mercy he never forgot.
When he entered Dachau, he weighed 69,8 kilograms; when he came out, he weighed 41 kilograms.
Vin was also left with scars on his face and limped when he walked.
After the war, Vin, now 35 and newly married to Lillian Hurley - they met through a POW correspondence program - returned to Munich to testify.
The car was waiting for him to take him to London when he returned from the wedding and received a summons.
The transcripts of his trial testimony, which he brought home with him, tell of what he saw.
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"Trained Sadists"
"In Dachau, hundreds of people were gassed, beaten to death, starved to death," Winn said at the trial.
"Hundreds of Christmas trees around the camp mark the grave of every Russian soldier, Polish priest or even Russian boy between the ages of eight and 15 who suffered the same cruelties and tortures of the SS and Gestapo - trained sadists who enjoyed seeing a man starve to death or enjoyed in beating or torturing people."
He managed to describe in detail some of the people who abused him, as well as a woman, one of the commander's secretaries, who witnessed the beatings and once stood over him and spat on him.
Win claimed that Christoph Knoll, a capo who was given the job of supervising the others, once bragged about kicking a man to death and is believed to have kicked a Polish priest in the genitals.
Both Kik and Nol were hanged in May 1946.
He said of another prison official, a former actor, that he was "indirectly the cause of 500 floggings that I know of alone."
Winn, believed to be originally from central Wales, lived with Lily in Nora Street in the Rout area of Cardiff but died in 1959.
His nephew Jeremy Hackman - who never got the chance to meet him in person - relayed his story.
"He never talked about it, but my aunt saved all the papers," he says.
"After the war, I don't think he worked - I think he was a bit of a broken, broken man, as it were, quite affected by what he had been through, but he still managed to settle down."
Jeremy said: "I keep thinking how it could have been me, it's not a movie hero - it's a man you know from the neighbourhood."
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