You know about Auschwitz, Dachau, Buchenwald. This place was the blueprint for them all.
Sachsenhausen is in the town of Oranienburg, a nice 45-minute country drive north of Berlin. But the pleasant rural surroundings do little to mask the ugly past of this place.
Heinrich Himmler ran the entire Nazi 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 for all the other camps were trained here. The sarcastic motto “Arbeit Macht Frei” — Work Makes You Free — was adopted systemwide after first appearing on Sachsenhausen’s main gate.
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 nothing happened in any camp that didn’t that didn’t happen here first.
In a very real sense, this 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.
None of that 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.
That triangular layout allowed the camp to be controlled by a minimum number of guards. The main gate stood at the apex of that triangle. Above it, a single heavy machine gun could “sweep” the entire camp grounds.
The machine gun is gone, but the gate is still here.
A handful of those barracks also remain — including the two where medical experiments were conducted on inmates — 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 is a single strand of bare wire running about a foot above the ground. This is a “dead man’s wire” and its meaning is clear: Step over this and you will be shot.
You could be beaten to death for not moving fast enough. Starved and brutalized for months and then years, 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 the noose, hanged by their friends at the orders of guards.
In December, a Christmas tree went up in place of the gallows.
DEATH BY “SCIENCE”
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.
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 prisoners hang other inmates for breaking camp rules. 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.
The inmates were marched through Oranienburg into the camp. Nazi authorities encouraged the residents to come out and jeer and throw things at them along the way. It grew to be such a farce that even the SS got tired of it, and started bringing them in at night through a back gate.
SECRET SHAME, SILENT SCREAMS
In April 1945, as Germany crumbled, the Sachsenhausen guards tried to march 33,000 inmates away from potential salvation. 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. They’re still here, buried in mass graves.
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.
In place of the old horrors is a sprawling emptiness and a bottomless silence, barely disturbed by the murmurs of visitors and the wind that sweeps across the grounds. You leave here feeling as if you’ve looked Evil in the face, and you leave forever changed.
In Sachsenhausen, silence is a scream that never ends.