Berlin: Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

We left our hotel about 9:30 this morning to go to a small town just outside the city limits of Berlin, called Sachsenhausen (pronounced Saxon-housen). The S-Bahn from Potsdammer Platz to nearby Oranienberg runs every half hour or so. The train we boarded didn’t go quite that far so when we disembarked we managed to get a taxi to take us the remaining distance. I asked the driver if he knew of the concentration camp. “Yes,” he said, “but I don’t like to speak of these things; they are of the past, of the old generation.” I said, yes, these things can be painful and difficult to talk about. “No,” he insisted, “it is not painful; it was all horrible but it does not have to do with today or with my generation. That is the past and we cannot live in the past or in the future but only in the present. Besides, if you look around the world you see the same things have happened everywhere.” Later he volunteered: “I have been to Cambodia and seen the things under Pol Pot; I have been all over Vietnam and talked to people harmed by the communists, so I know that there are terrible things that have happened.” It was not comfortable for him to talk to us like that but it seemed that he tried, that he communicated both defensiveness and a willingness to say that what happened in Germany under the Nazis was very bad. It must be terribly difficult for, as he says, his generation, born after the war, to live with especially, as with our guide, Martin, his own parents, grandparents, teachers, and so on, are implicated in various ways with what happened.

We arrived at the former camp, now called the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, with a darkening sky overhead. Slab concrete walls announce its history and current function. The first building is a book store and a site of introductory exhibits, as well as a repository of audio equipment in several languages. There is no entrance fee. Leaving this building with our audio guides, we walked along an alley of about 600 meters to the entrance of the camp. On the stone walls of the camp to our left were large photos of prisoners and of their guards engaged in various mundane or deadly actions. We entered through a large gate into a broad forecourt. To the right is a large building which houses a separate exhibit, built by the Soviets who took over Sachsenhausen in 1945, using it until 1950 for their own German political prisoners. Ahead is the inner gate which leads to the actual camp.

The camp consisted of many long, narrow buildings made of wood which radiated out from the centre created by the entrance way. Each was only one story in height, allowing guards in the central tower to see clearly any activities between the buildings. Most of the original buildings have been destroyed but their footprints clearly survive. The few that still stand have been repaired and now house the exhibits which we visited. The exhibit book that we purchased when leaving makes the point that the buildings do not themselves divulge their history because the camps were not primarily complexes of buildings. Rather, they quote Ab Nikolas, a Dutch camp survivor who said that the concentration camp was in reality “the screaming, the stench, the cramped conditions and the violence which existed in and around these inexpressive buildings.” The thrust of all of the camps was to instill into prisoners the awareness of their entire helplessness and indeed, essential nothingness. They were greeted by yelling guards with their barking dogs who were trained to attack, hit severely about the body and head with rubber truncheons, and forced into spaces where they were summarily striped of their clothing, left naked and defenceless to have all the hair on their bodies shaved, rinsed with some form of Lysol, given stripped prisoners’ garb, and assigned a number (later in the war tattooed into their forearms), now the only name by which they would be identified.

Most of our time in the camp was spent in a building which housed the infirmary or camp hospital. It was connected to the camp kitchen which we also saw. Each room of the former “hospital” is dedicated to a particular function enacted there. Mainly it was a place for experimentation, using prisoners as guinea pigs. After some Polish partisans had shot a few German soldiers with bullets infused with poison, experiments were conducted at Sachsenhausen to test the efficacy of such a weapon. Prisoners were shot with poisoned bullets and were left to die from the effects of the poison rather than the bullets. Their deaths were often slow and painful. Other prisoners were injected with differing levels of mustard gas – some on only one area, some on many. The lesions caused by the injections were studied while various forms of “treatments” were tested.

Like many areas instigated by Nazi policy in the early days of their power, actions applying to one population or problem, soon morphed in  more deadly and expansive ways. In 1934 “Hereditary Health Courts” were set up to organize sterilization procedures for people with “hereditary illnesses,” such as mental illness. This category gradually broadened to include anyone stigmatized as being racially or socially inferior, dangerously criminal. or, homosexual. Forced sterilization was conducted in the camp on Sinti and Roma people and on homosexuals.

One of the most chilling exhibits told the story of eleven boys about 12 or 13 years of age who were selected on arrival at Auschwitz by a Dr Dohman, a colleague of Mengele. Dohman had a background in communicable diseases. Hepatitis had broken out in some military barracks and he had been tasked to discover the nature and causes of this disease. He chose these boys, too young to be selected for labour, destined for the gas chamber, and had them sent to Sachsenhausen as it was closer to his own place of work. The room in which the exhibit was mounted was the actual room that eight of the boys had shared throughout their captivity. The room had held four sets of bunk beds, a sink and a mirror. Each boy was given thorough examinations before the tests began. Then each was injected with the hepatitis organisms; his illness was carefully observed and recorded; later a liver biopsy was taken by a needle inserted through his ribs. Dohman may have had some inner struggle about his using these boys as in latter stages of his involvement he ceased speaking with them directly but would only address his aides on the project – they themselves prisoners with previous medical training. When the project was completed the boys were told to be ready to be moved from the building. They knew that this meant that they would be taken with other patients to the small gas chamber that had built in the camp and they were terrified. The prisoner doctors, Norwegians who had been arrested for political reasons, decided to intervene. They sent their most senior, a man respected by the camp commandant, to ask that the boys be kept as they were “still needed for experiments.” The commandant agreed and had their names stricken from the list. Most of the boys survived the camp and were liberated by Soviet forces while on a death march at the end of the war. They were reunited 50 years later when the organization responsible for setting up the memorial and museum contacted them. Their stories and videotaped interviews with them are mounted on the wall of their former room.

Sachsenhausen was founded in 1936. Like other early concentration camps, its expected inmates were German political dissidents: social democrats and communists. Gradually other populations swelled its rolls – Jews, Roma and Sinti, and political opponents from other countries as they were overrun by the German army. Always establishing their power over others through violence, the SS gradually increased its use within the camp. Over the winter of 1936-7 seven men were murdered – one shot, the others from severe torture. A cell block had been segregated in which the SS could conduct interrogations and punishments. Prisoners could be confined in dark spaces for long periods, beaten, or hung by reversed arms from a pole. Punishment beatings were carried out with the prisoner strapped down to a trestle. Twenty-five or more blows were given on the lower back and backside. Victims could not walk or sit down for days afterward; some died because of severe kidney damage. The SS performed this beating in the early years but after 1942 other prisoners were required to do it.

In 1937 about 3000 prisoners were added as another camp was closed; soon afterward the prisoners were required to wear differently coloured badges to indicate their category: in protective custody; in preventative custody; antisocial; Jews; Roma, homosexuals; and so on. More than 1000 homosexuals were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen between 1936-45; more than 600 of them died during that period, mainly from sadistic treatments by SS guards. Jews were at the bottom of the SS list of categories and were treated most brutally of all. Prisoners were used for heavy labour, especially those being punished. Many died under the conditions imposed in those sites, particularly in the brickworks and the clay pits.

Schedules were imposed upon the prisoners like those in an army barracks but with considerably more stress and abuse regularly heaped upon them. Beds were three tier narrow bunks with thin straw mattresses teeming with bugs. When large groups of new prisoners were added, each bunk might hold up to three men. The day room consisted of six rows of lockers, five tables, some benches and stools and a heater. Each morning in a short period between 300-500 prisoners had to wash and eat in this space. One group would eat their bread while others used the bathroom, where those who had died in the night were laid on the floor.

Immediately after the beginning of the war the population of the camp was enormously increased: German political opponents and male Polish Jews and stateless Jews were interred by the thousands. Over a thousand Czech students were imported to Sachsenhausen after demonstrations. Within a few months the population had doubled to 12,200. Food rations were severely cut: In the morning there was coffee – really just stewed water; in the evening a bit of cabbage or turnip soup with no real substance, no fat. Still all work had to be done at the double. Many thousands died because of the living conditions. Some prisoners banded together for mutual support; they could sometimes make useful items to barter with other prisoners or guards for extra food.

In early January, 1940 Rudolph Hoss, later in charge of the extermination camp at Auschwitz, forced over 800 prisoners to stand on the parade ground for the entire day in below freezing temperatures. Over 140 were dead by the next day; 700 prisoners in all died that month. Hoss was tried and executed after the war. The atrocities carried out in the camp multiplied in number and horror as the war continued. In the autumn of 1941 the SS shot over 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war. They were taken in groups of twenty to a prepared area. Then each was taken into another place “to be measured.” As the prisoner stood against the measuring stick, an SS guard hidden in an adjacent room would shoot him through a hidden slit in the wall.

The killing functions of the camp continued to escalate. By 1942 a new complex, Station Z, as it was known, was established on the camp grounds but separate from the other barracks. It contained killing rooms, four crematoria, and in 1943, a gas chamber. These facilities were used to kill existing prisoners as well as people brought to the camp specifically for this purpose. Periodically after 1942 a prisoner would be publically hanged in the roll-call area with the other prisoners forced to watch.

Throughout the war new populations of prisoners were sent to Sachsenhausen and other groups were sent away. In 1942, for example, large groups of Jews were sent to Auschwitz. The brutality of guards and conditions remained unabated. As the Soviet armies grew closer in 1945 remaining prisoners who could walk were sent out of the camp on death marches. Many died on route.

Being in the camp and reading of the lives and deaths of these men while there I experienced a deep sense of what I could only identify as a profound humility, a sense of being so little, so insignificant as to almost not be, but at the same time, small as I am, touching something of their anguish. I don’t know if that sounds fanciful. It is the closest I can come to expressing now what it was like to stand in that space.  

Tomorrow we will leave Berlin and travel by train to Warsaw. The pictures shown below are: masks made of the faces of two Roma brothers who were murdered here, to be sent to the Berlin organization conducting research on the differences of skulls and general physiognamy of different "races;" the room in which the eight boys infected with hepatitis lived at Sachsenhausen; the entrance to Sachsenhausen.