Memorializing Those Lost

Today was a somber day as we visited Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg.  There is a lot of history and appalling facts to learn.  As young students we learn the overview and maybe some minute details during primary and secondary school, but this was a completely different experience.  It is haunting and almost unreal the number of people that were sent to the camp (38,000).  It was built for 10,000 and when you walk into the camp it's actually not as big as you would expect.

The victims of the camp were labeled by stars that represented why they were targeted, eg. criminals, homosexuals, Jews, gypsy, political party, etcetera.  Sachsenhausen was predominantly an adult male camp.  Two or more stars did not bode well for the prisoner.  For a long time there were no Jews in the camp, but later they were sent also and separated into a specific part of the camp.  There was a production section of the camp because the Nazis desired to be efficient in every thing they did, so it was only sensible to make the prisoners work for them also.

Our tour guide, Finn, explaining the Last March

In the early 1940s the Nazis created the extermination plan to eradicate all people victimized by the Holocaust.  The easiest way for them to do this was to send them on a march in the middle of the winter  to the sea for them to die of exposure.  The ones who were left were going to be put on barges loaded with explosives and sent into the sea.

The road leading up to Sachsenhausen camp

The town of Oranienburg is actually quiet quaint.  The road leading up to is lined with houses that were previously inhabited by SS Officers.  It is strange to me that people can live so close to the camp and live in houses previously owned by SS Officers, but I also understand that you can't live life in a state of fear of talking about the issues and remembering history so as not to repeat it.

The gate to Sachsenhausen

We entered Sachsenhausen camp through the above gate.  The clock at the top of the gate is stopped permanently at 11:07 to remember their liberation when the Soviet soldiers took over.  The gate is marked with a phrase in German that translates to "work liberates."

Today was an incredibly windy and cloudy day so it was quite cold.  We were standing in the middle of the camp listening to Finn tell us how one of the Chief officers experimented with a process of natural selection at the camp one winter when the ground temperature was -30 degrees celsius, the outside temperature -27 degrees celsius and knee-deep snow on the ground.  He required all the prisoners to stand outside in their roll call formation all day.  This killed many which allowed for the SS to not feel guilt for personally murdering them.  We all felt pretty awful for complaining about mid 50s and windy.

There are several museums located throughout the camp to show artifacts such as the uniforms that were standard.  One of the artifacts is the corpse collection apparatus.  It looks like a wooden structure of a wheel barrow.  The other prisoners were required to collect the corpses and dispose of them, or sometimes stand up them in roll call formation.  All deaths were reported as something other than the real reason, ie. exposure or killed in flight.

Finn also explained several of the torture tactics to us, such as hangings, running around the track in shoes two sizes too small with a bookbag full of bricks for an entire day, hanging backwards by the arms, and starvation chambers.  The whole process of dehumanizing the prisoners.

There was a special prison located on site that was run by the Gestapo.  This was for criminals or people hated by the SS.  Stalin's son was held captive there.  The SS tried to bargain with Stalin his son for a valued soldier the Soviets had captured, but he did not find the bargain fair (as for the rank of the soldiers).  Stalin's actual last name was something I cannot even attempt to spell but it reminded me of jujubes.  He changed his name to Stalin, which means steel.  Hitler also changed his name from Schickelgruber.  Two of the most infamously evil people in history felt it necessary to change their names to something that would give them more clout.

Our second to last stop on our tour of the camp was Station Z (the "exit") which housed the showers, the shooting room, and the ovens.  Finn explained to us what occurred in those areas and also explained that there was so much ash the SS would mix it into the concrete for walkways.  The track throughout the camp is called the Walk of Bones because of this.

The ovens in Station Z (the "exit")

A demarcation of a mass grave of over 2,000 lbs of ashes

Our last stop was the medical barracks and the experimentation barrack.  The medical experiments were done with the least amount of ethics possible, but a lot of information was discovered through this, especially with penicillin.  The SS were also experimenting in creating an amphetamine to make their soldiers last longer in the field, it is now known as speed.  After the war was over there was a controversy over whether to keep the findings or throw them out because of how they were obtained.

An autopsy table in the medical barracks

Soviets ran it as a prisoner of war camp after liberating the victims of the Holocaust.  It was considered a silent camp, once sometime was taken prisoner there they were never heard from again.

This clearly isn't all the facts and history that was shared but a good general overview of our day.  Some of us felt strange about taking pictures of the camp, but we decided that people would probably rather be remembered than forgotten.