Visiting Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

Panorama of the Camp

Entrance to the camp: During operation (left)   2012 (right)

"Work will set you free" 

Ruins of the Crematorium

On Friday, Thorsten took us to visit the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp site/memorial.  The reading for this week talked about how East and West Germany dealt with the actual sites of the camps. I learned that for about 10-15 years after the end of the war and the liberation of the camps, that they were mostly ignored and allowed to fall to ruins.  Sachsenhausen lies in former East Germany, about an hour north of Berlin. Controversies arose about how to properly memorialize the camp and what should be reconstructed.  In 1961, the GDR created its own memorial of the site, compromising the integrity of what actually happened there, as it was seen as a memorial for communists, and the presence of the Jews was almost entirely ignored.  After reunification, the memorial was redone to restore the integrity of the camps original layout, not by complete reconstruction, but recreating a sense of the boundaries of the camp and the pathways taken by the prisoners.   The reading also talked about landscape as memory and the history that is tied in to places of great tragedy such as concentration camps.  Being in the camp was a very powerful experience. The entire time I was there I felt a sense of sadness and uneasiness from just being in a place associated with so much death and suffering.  Unlike other camps, Sachsenhausen was primarily a forced labor camp, and not an extermination camp, although many people died there, around 100,000 people died of malnutrition, disease and starvation, among other causes. Although it was not meant for extermination as its sole purpose, there was still an area, called "Station Z" where people were systematically murdered by gunfire and then their bodies were burned in the crematorium. Thorsten told us a story about how supposedly people were brought into a room one by one, and that a guard would tell them that the SS needed their height, and that after going against the wall to be measured, someone on the other side would shoot them in the head. Then after they would be carried into the next room and promptly burned.  It was a very sad experience being in the camp.   We also saw the remains of the "Jew Barracks" which had been set on fire by Neo-Nazis in the 1990s.  Half of it had been destroyed, and an exhibition was erected in its place. The other half, while having evidence of being burned, still stood and I was able to walk through and see what it was like. I can't imagine having to live in the conditions that they did, and it really brought all of the things that I have been learning about Berlin and the Holocaust into real life.  Thorsten also explained that within the camp, not all prisoners were equal, and that a suppression tactic used by the SS to remain in power was to create disparity and hatred among prisoners by creating a hierarchy. I found this very interesting because I assumed that all of the prisoners would be united by their common suffering, but I learned that this was not the case.

Living Quarters of the "Jew Barracks" 

More later, Ciao from Berlin
Becca