Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Trip Start
Mar 19, 2009
1
12
35
Trip End
Ongoing
Berlin, Germany
Saturday, April 4, 2009
It was mainly for political prisoners. About 200 000 people passed through, 100 000 of which died of exhaustion, starvation and other diseases. There were some horrible stories told there; about guards hanging people just because they felt like it and horribly torturing prisoners. The camp was also a centre for counterfeit notes - prisoners with artistic skills spent their time creating english currency, which apparently was never discovered.
You walked right through the camp, first through the gates bearing the infamous 'Arbeit macht frei' and around through their camps, their bathrooms (rooms about 5x3m where something like 400 men would be told they have a couple of minutes to use them - the crook, weaker men would be trampled and covered in whatever by the end of this stampede.) There was this track made of different surfaces where they would be forced to run for eight hours on end, testing millitary workboots. I also saw where food was prepared, where they were publicly hung, workshops, mass graves and the gas chambers. They weren`t planning on having these, they were added later because they must have realised later they needed a quicker way to kill people off.
Later on, I took the train to Potsdam, a town south of Berlin.It was rather pretty and nice to end a day like that walking amongst pretty waterside gardens.
