Berlin Part II

Sachsenhausen

On Friday, we took a guided tour out to Sachsenhausen, a concentration camp just outside Berlin. The whole experience is really hard to describe. It’s one thing to read about these things or even see pictures or movies, but to actually stand on the spot where these things happened, is something else. It was intense. Sachsenhausen was not the first concentration camp but it was the first to be built with that intention. It became the model camp, and camps after it were based on it and structured similarly. It was first used as political prisoner work camp but it gradually began to include more people as Hitler’s plan for the Jews progressed. After the war ended in 1945 and the Soviets took control of East Germany, the camp was used by the Soviets as a prison until 1950. They tried to cover up a lot of what went on there and some information has only recently come out about what happened.

In the 60s or 70s, the East German government built a memorial to those killed in the camp, but they only acknowledged the communist victims. They made no mention of the Jews or other people groups there, and they built these very historically inaccurate reconstructions and one kind of disturbing statue depicting the liberation of the camp with a very healthy Soviet prisoner being greeted by a Soviet businessperson and soldier. Our guide told us that most of the East German memorial will be torn down and replaced with accurate replications, but the statue will stay up to show another aspect of the history of that place, the East German spin on things I guess. Does that make sense? I don’t know if I explained that well.

The whole experience is really hard to describe. It’s one thing to read about these things or even see pictures or movies, but to actually stand on the spot where these things happened, is something else. It was intense. I had to keep reminding myself where I was because the whole thing was just unreal.

The camp is located on the edge of the town of Oranienburg and people live very close to the edges of the camp. Our guide answered the question we were all thinking: how could the people of Oranienburg be so close to this and not know what was going on? Or if they knew what was going on, why didn’t they do anything? She said that you have to ask yourself what you would have done. If you had a family, or children. If the government put up a prison (which was what it began as), you would think that people who were in there deserved to be in there for some reason, wouldn’t you? But then, when does it cross the line? And what do you do? It’s hard to think about and I don’t know any answers. I just hope that this never happens again.