(NOTE: This was first posted in July 2009. It has been re-posted to repair formatting problems in the old version.)
You know about Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. This place was the blueprint for them all.
Sachsenhausen is in the town of Oranienburg, a pleasant 45-minute country drive north of Berlin. But there is nothing pleasant about Sachsenhausen.
Heinrich Himmler ran the entire concentration camp system from Oranienburg, and Sachsenhausen was his testbed. Opened in 1936, it was the first Nazi facility purpose-built as a concentration camp, the prototype for Auschwitz, Dachau and all the rest.
The SS camp guards were trained here. The sarcastic motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” — Work Makes You Free — was adopted after first appearing on Sachsenhausen’s main gate.
Nothing happened in any camp that didn’t that didn’t happen here first.
We Americans didn’t hear much about Sachsenhausen, mainly because throughout the Cold War, it was in what was then East Germany, behind the Iron Curtain. But in a very real sense, it was the cradle of Nazi genocide.
The route from Berlin to Sachsenhausen is lined with cool, green forests and picturesque country homes of two and three stories, with steeply angled tile roofs to shed rain and snow. The camp itself lies at the end of a pleasant little residential street.
But nothing prepares you for what awaits at the end of that street.
A sprawling triangular complex of about a thousand acres, Sachsenhausen is defined by a perimeter wall interspersed with guard towers. At its height, there were 68 long, one-story barracks, laid out in a fan pattern.
A handful of those barracks — including the two where medical experiments were conducted on inmates — remain, along with the “execution trench” and a portion of the inner-perimeter death strip that includes a once-electrified fence.
In front of the fence and the barbed wire coils is a single strand of unadorned wire, running about a foot above the ground. In prison parlance, this is a “dead man’s wire” and its meaning is clear:
Step over this and you will be shot.
You didn’t have to be shot to die here, though. You could be beaten to death simply for not moving fast enough. Starved and brutalized, inmates sometimes dropped dead during roll call.
Two holes in the ground served as mounts for a simple, inefficient gallows. The condemned were left to slowly strangle in their nooses.
In December, a Christmas tree went up in place of the gallows.
DEATH BY “SCIENCE”
Then, there were the experiments. Doctors here injected Jewish children as young as 11 with the incurable hepatitis C. They stitched moldy hay into prisoners’ flesh to “study” gangrene. They made masks of inmates faces, copies of their eyes.
In addition to Jews, they seemed to have a special “fascination” with the Roma, as seen here.
Mask made of inmates' faces, two gypsy brothers.
Periodically, a Nazi psychologist visited Sachsenhausen to select inmates to send to the death camps, which he did as cheerfully as if he were delivering milk.
The cruelty wasn’t limited to physical brutality or scientific sadism.
The SS officers treated themselves to lavish banquets, which they made their starving prisoners serve them. They made other prisoners hang condemned inmates for rules violations.
They told new arrivals that their path to freedom ran through the chimneys of the camp’s “special” ovens.
They seemed to think that was funny.
SECRET SHAME, SILENT SCREAMS
In April 1945, as Germany crumbled, the Sachsenhausen guards tried to march 33,000 inmates away from potential rescue by the Red Army. Those too weak or sick to keep up were beaten or shot — or just died where they fell.
Thousands of them.
When the Red Army finally overran the camp, they found 3,000 inmates, barely alive, and nearly 13,000 bodies. That should’ve closed the book on Sachsenhausen.
It didn’t. The Soviet NKVD turned it into one of their “special camps,” where they imprisoned Nazis, Red Army deserters or soldiers who caught venereal diseases from women in occupied Germany.
By the time the place closed for good in 1950, at least another 12,000 people had died here.
Overall, no one really knows how many died in Sachsenhausen. Guesses range from 30,000 to as many as 100,000 — minus however many died on the death march.
You leave here feeling as if you’ve looked into the face of Evil, and you leave forever changed.
In place of the old horrors is now sprawling emptiness. The wind that sweeps across the vast grounds — and the murmurs of visitors — are the only sounds here now.
In Sachsenhausen, silence is a scream that never ends.
