Berlin Part II: Sachsenhausen Memorial

Not all travel can be (or should be) joyful. There's too much history for that.
It's still important to observe what remains of dark times.

Sachsenhausen.


The Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum is fairly close to Berlin and was the first new camp established after the appointment of Heinrich Himmler as Chief of the German Police in 1936. The camp functioned as a model and training ground for other concentration camps until Soviets liberated it in April 1945. Between these dates it imprisoned more than 200,000 people; first mainly political prisoners and later those groups targeted by National Socialist ideology. Tens of thousands died in the camps and thousands of others died on death march away from the front line as the Soviets approached in 1945 to liberate the 3,000 sick prisoners left behind.

Path of the Death March

Sachsenhausen's grim history was not yet complete at the end of WWII. From August 1945, the Soviet secret serviced used it as "Special Camp No. 7", using much of the buildings (excepting the crematorium and extermination facilities), for the same purposes as before, now imprisoning minor Nazi functionaries, politically undesirable people, arbitrarily arrested people, and those sentenced by Soviet Military tribunals. Sachsenhausen became "Special Camp No. 1" in 1948 and the largest of three special camps in the Soviet zone of occupation of Germany. It was finally closed in March 1950, after 60,000 people had been imprisoned there and 12,000 had died of malnutrition and disease.
The site was converted into a National Memorial by Soviet occupation forces in 1961 (the same year the Berlin wall was constructed) and many of the original structures were destroyed and replaced with symbols of the victory of anti-Fascism over Fascism.

*much of this history comes from the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum "Brief History and Site Plan"

Walking down to the Entrance

Work makes you free.
Creepy. As. Hell.

From personal experience, Sachsenhausen is intensely creepy. At the mortuary building, we learned about tattoos cut from their owners as curiosities to be bottled, faked autopsies (slits cut in the chest) to bypass real investigations into deaths, and postmortem decapitations for the pseudo-science of racial classification. In the infirmary we learned of horrible experiments on young Jewish children in which they were injected with hepatitis and observed s they fell sick and died. We saw the mass graves, the cremation champers, methods designed to obscure the prisoner's fate as long as possible such as the deep, log-insulated killing pit and a device disguised as a ruler, obscuring a slit through which SS officials could shoot prisoners in the neck efficiently for the disposal of Soviet prisoners of war... It was fairly overwhelming.

The "don't go there, you'll get shot" zone

In the back of the camp is a gigantic Soviet memorial which now dominates the landscape. Many of the former barracks have been demolished and replaced with stone outlining where they used to lie and black slate filling the area.

Buildings left standing and to the left the
outline of a building, filled with black slate.
All the buildings faced into the center of an arch,
focused on the entrance.

The buildings which used to house the administration of the camp now contain exhibitions of artifacts and memorials for the site. The central room of the building features large Soviet-era stained glass windows done in a style reminiscent both of medieval windows and futurism.

See the parachutes?

Memorials on the wall

The mass graves and modern memorial towards the front of the camp have many stones laid upon them- remembrances by those who have visited.

Mass graves from those who died of the 3,000 left when the
Soviets arrived in 1945.  

The foundations of the crematorium. 

Memorial in the crematorium; the foundations are
covered by a large permanent tent. 

The wind started up as soon as we left, underlying the cold, harsh conditions that inmates, much less well dressed than we, would have endured. Rain fell very, very heavily as we walked back to the train.

The soviet memorial.