Sachsenhausen

It may not be as well known as Auschwitz, Treblinka and Sobibor, but Sachsenhausen is where the horrors of the Holocaust began.

Our tour guide was Xavier, the same guide who led my Cold War / Nazi tour in Berlin a few days earlier. He told me he gives this tour only once a week because the topic is so heavy and he needs to protect his mental health.

We met at a Berlin train station and then took the same route that prisoners were transported starting in July 1936, a month before the Berlin Olympics. We walked the 20 minutes from the train station to the site of the camp.

On the outside of the camp is the administrative building that sent out orders to all of the Nazi’s extermination and concentration camps. It was also a training ground for SS soldiers, who were given homes on the perimeter as both a reward for their loyalty and a warning to civilians to stay away from the site.

The homes in the background were given to SS officers. Today it’s a regular neighborhood. I can’t imagine living in a house with that history.

Inside the main gate, the clock is frozen at the time it was liberated by the Polish Army on April 22, 1945.

Of the 200,000 prisoners who entered the gates of a camp built to house 10,000 people, only 20 percent were alive by the end of the war. Most of the buildings are gone now — looted for scraps after the Soviets abandoned the site in 1950 — but you can see the outlines of where they were located on the 740 acre site:

The site is just enormous and it contained all of the elements that would be later used at the extermination camps — the medical experimentation wings, the firing squad pit, the gas chambers and crematoriums. Everything was tested and perfected here for five years and then deployed at Auschwitz and elsewhere.

There are a few barracks remaining. Neo-Nazis set this one on fire in the early 1990s after the collapse of East Germany. You can see the peeling paint on the ceiling — the Germans decided to leave it as a reminder rather than cover up that part of history.

Inside, the barracks had bunk beds, initially one for each person but later two and even three people per single bed as the camp became massively overcrowded. Built for 10,000 prisoners, it housed more than 50,000 by the end of the war.

There were maybe 6 toilets for a building that had up to 250 prisoners and fights would break out because prisoners wanted to be in the middle of formation for morning roll call because (1) that offered some protection from the wind and (2) being on the fringes of the formation increased the chances of being attacked by guard dogs or beaten by the Nazis.

We also saw the camp’s prison, where high value prisoners were held, including the prime ministers of France and Spain. The one cell that caught my attention was where they held German theologian Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller.

You may or may not know that name but I bet you know the poem he wrote after he was liberated:

First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.