I wanted to head out to the Sachsenhausen concentration Camp but was torn between wanting to take a day tour so I would know exactly what it was I would be looking at, and going on our own so we wouldn’t be rushed around in a huge group like when I went through Auschwitz. The tour was 14Euro each, which didn’t include transport and considering entry into Sachsenhausen is free is seemed a bit outrageous to pay that price for a guide with a group of 40 others. So I jumped online and found a downloadable audio guide for the site for $7 which Luke and I downloaded into our iPods and off we went. I can’t recommend the audio guide enough! It was so great, all the information I wanted with none of the hassle, time restrictions or crowds of going with a tour. I’m going to try downloading walking tours for all the big cities I go to now. Fantastic!
A little about the camp itself…its about 45 minutes by the S-Bahn out of the center of Berlin (and there were background history segments to listen to on the audio guide on the way there!). At the end of the line is Oranienburg station and from there it is a 2km walk to the Sachsenhausen Memorial.
Sachsenhausen was set up as the ‘model’ concentration camp by the Nazi’s primarily for political prisoners from 1936 to the end of the Third Reich in May, 1945 and as a training centre for SS officers. After World War II, when Oranienburg was in the Soviet Occupation Zone, the structure was used as an NKVD special camp until 1950. The remaining buildings and grounds are now open to the public as a museum.
Sachsenhausen was intended to set a standard for other concentration camps, both in its design and the treatment of prisoners. The camp perimeter is an equilateral triangle with a semi circular roll call area centred on the main entrance gate in the side running northeast to southwest. Barrack huts lay beyond the roll call area, radiating from the gate. The layout was intended to allow the machine gun post in the entrance gate to dominate the camp but in practice it was necessary to add additional watchtowers to the perimeter. The standard barrack layout was to have a central washing area and a separate room with toilet bowls and a right and left wing for overcrowded sleeping rooms.
There was an infirmary inside the southern angle of the perimeter and a camp prison within the eastern angle. There was also a camp kitchen and a camp laundry. The camp's capacity became inadequate and the camp was extended in 1938 by a new rectangular area (the "special camp") north east of the entrance gate and the perimeter wall was altered to enclose it.
The first thing you notice on arrival is a stark grey wall with evenly spaced sections missing out of if from which you enter the site. This is where the original wall of the camp stood and now can be passed through freely.
From there we entered via Tower A into the main compound area in which people were held. Virtually all the barracks have been destroyed but a wall has been erected in a semi-circle surrounding the roll-call area with facades of barracks displayed where the original barracks would have stood facing Tower A.
There are grey stone slabs dotted over the grounds which at first glace I thought were gravestones but in fact they represent the location of a former barracks. These slabs mostly had small stones on top of them, placed by Jewish visitors to the memorial as a sign of respect for the victims. Of the remaining barracks the living conditions were terrible, 700 people to a barracks and bathroom facilities for about 50. There was no heating, and this area of Germany often gets down below 0 degrees Celsius.
The infirmary, where victims were ‘treated’, experimented on or simply beaten to death has an incredible museum that recounts the horrors of medicine and mistreatment that took place there. Next to the infirmary if the Pathology Building, the top floor of which held a lab and autopsy room to examine the bodies of victims who died within the camp from various reasons, usually starvation, disease or exposure. The basement level was a cool underground tiled series of chambers that was used as a morgue into which the bodies were rolled down from the autopsy room via a steep concrete slope outside.
The remains could still be seen of the underground gas chambers and cremations ovens of the area known as Station Z. This name came about as the entrance to Sachsenhausen was Tower A and this was the only exit so it must be Station Z, according to those who lived and worked there.
The site, although much smaller in size and scale than Auschwitz and Birkenau, waas nonetheless very sobering and personally I felt it was a more compelling place overall. That was probably partly to do with the fact that there was no compulsory tour so we were free to spend the whole day there looking at everything, rather than being rushed through in a horde as well as there being far less visitors at Sachsenahusen. The whole area is extraordinarily well documented and the museums and exhibits are all really well presented.
