SACHSENHAUSEN MEMORIAL AND CONCENTRATION CAMP

The Sachsenhausen concentration camp was set up as early as 1936 - the year of the Berlin Olympic Games - to intern opponents of Hitler's regime, then known as the Schutzhäftlinge, those who were locked up as a "security measure". The first of them were mainly Communists or Democrats, to which were added over time the "anti-socials", homosexuals and Jews. In the autumn of 1941, tens of thousands of Soviet prisoners of war - about 13,000 - were murdered in Station Z (whose cynical name indicates that it was the last station) and many inhuman experiments were carried out on the detainees: one can thus discover with horror lampshades made of human flesh. In October 1942, Jewish prisoners from the camp were deported to Auschwitz. When the imminence of the fall of the regime was evident, the SS evacuated the camp with 33,000 inmates to the Baltic Sea, where they were to be shipped off and drowned. Nearly 1,000 of them died in this "death march" while the others were saved in extremis by the Allies. In the camp itself, 3,000 prisoners witnessed the liberation. But 300 of them did not survive the liberation and died as a result of their internment. The horror did not stop there: as soon as the German surrender took place, the Russian secret police returned to the camp to imprison the war prisoners and opponents of the communist regime. Searches uncovered 10,000 prisoners' bodies. In 1961, the partially restored camp was opened to the public as a memorial to the victims of the Nazi regime with the inscription "Arbeit macht frei" (Work makes you free), the macabre leitmotif found in all concentration camps. The large square directly after the entrance was used for the morning roll call and the execution of prisoners. On the ground, large rectangles filled with stones indicate the location of the various barracks. Two of them are now open at public : one has been turned into a museum and the other into a cinema in which a film on the history of the camp is shown every hour. Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 people were detained in the Sachsenhausen camp.

The audioguide at the entrance to the memorial provides valuable information about the places you will visit inside the camp.