Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Originally published at Walking on Christopher's Street. You can comment here or there.
I can begin by giving you a history, but honestly Wikipedia does a great job with the basics right here and also additional information can be found on this site
For sometime, I have wanted to visit for myself a concentration camp, to try to experience first hand a miniscule amount of what that time in the late 30’s and 40’s was like, I went on the tour from New Berlin Tours with Annabell, very good choice I might say. She is from Perth, Australia but was a German history major. I think it actually made it better, she said that many of her native colleagues have a skewed view of the history, because they are almost ashamed at what the country was involved with. We took the train up to Orainenberg, about a 45 min ride, and they weather was overcast and kind of drizzling. We walked the 1.8 Kil (a little over a mile) we walked fast, and I was a little in pain, but the guide mentioned that prisoners had to make this same route double time, almost a jog. When we view all of the exhibits, the was a cold driving rain, it was cold, but we were wearing coats, scarfs and hats. I the prisoners only had thin cotton jumpers, think light pajama’s and no hair, because they were shaved bald.
You enter the Camp at Building “A” and Building “Z” is where you left the camp (and this world) as it was the area of the extermination and crematorium. Sachsenhausen was not one of the death camps, were people were sent to die, but people were still killed there. They were also the training camp for the SS, so they had a small gas chamber. The preferred method of killing was by shotting. First in a pit, the prisoners where run down a hill into a dead end pit and the wall was made of would to absorb the bullets that they were shot with. The bodies were removed to the crematorium and the bullets harvested from the wood and remelted to be shot again. As the time went on, the prisoners were led into a series of rooms for what they were told was a medical exam. In one of the first rooms a “dental” exam was taken, in the last room, they were told their height would be taken, as they stood with their back to the wall the marker for height was brought down open a small hole in the back of the neck, where and SS guard would then shoot them. The bodies were moved to the next room where the results of the dental exam were reviewed to see if there was any precious metals in their teeth so they could be removed before cremation.
As the allies were about to liberate the Camp, the SS guards - or probably the prisoners under order from the guards, dumped 8-9 tuns of human ash into the canal to hide their doings.
Also at Sachsenhausen was where the plot to flood the market with counterfeit money in US and UK money, to ruin their economies was underway.