Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Today, our group visited the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp and Memorial in Oranienburg – a town just north of Berlin. Gaby, our program director, had warned us that the day would be an emotional one, but I had no idea how much the visit would affect me. Like most other Americans, I have learned about Nazi Germany and the Holocaust mostly through my school education, museum visits, and movies. And, although I have been moved emotionally by these experiences, nothing in my past could have remotely prepared me for the impact of physically standing in the place where the events themselves transpired. To see the buildings, to stand next to the barbed-wire barricades and stone walls, and even to walk the same paths that the prisoners did: from the wrought-iron entrance gate bearing the sarcastic phrase Arbeit macht frei into the roll-call yard where prisoners were forced to stand in all types of weather until every person had been accounted for or until the SS officers had had enough laughs watching them freeze; from the unbelievably small and cramped sleeping quarters – three persons forced to sleep in one wooden bunk smaller than a child’s twin bed – to the hidden, downward slope that was supposedly the route followed by prisoners expecting to be transferred to other camps that, instead, led to a sheltered enclave where prisoners where either hanged or shot to death.
To be honest, I cannot even comprehend all that I saw yesterday; not because of any language or cultural barriers, but because I think my brain is having difficulty processing the sheer depth and complexity of the evil that was carried out in that place. That place…which is only one of so, so many where these atrocities happened every day for years while the surrounding towns and townspeople were either unable or perhaps unwilling to voice dissent.
Our tour guide was fantastically knowledgeable and was very accommodating of our many questions about the concentration camp and about that time period in general. She was able to help us understand the precision of the Nazi Regime’s horrendous “final solution� and also to see how the plans had changed and developed over time.
In visiting the foundations of the crematorium at Sachsenhausen, she explained how the Nazis decided to deal with the “disposal� of over eleven thousand Russian/Soviet military war prisoners who had been brought to the camp after Germany’s invasion of that country. Knowing that they were holding as prisoners very well-trained, strong men, they decided first to lock them in the living quarters without food to weaken them. Still fearing some resistance, the SS officers at the concentration camp devised an elaborate scheme to murder the soldiers. The prisoners were told that they would be transferred to another camp and be put to work. However, before that could happen, they would each need to be examined by a doctor.
One by one, the prisoners were brought to a front room of the crematorium (which they would not have recognized because they had only just arrived at the camp and were isolated from the other prisoners) where an SS officer pretending to be a doctor told them to disrobe. With very loud music playing throughout this examination room and over the rest of the camp, the “doctor� would check their vital signs and then tell them to go into the next room where height was to be measured. Built into the wall of this smaller, double-walled (i.e. for better soundproofing) room were wooden slats with measurement marks. When the soldier-prisoner stood against the slats to have his height taken, he was shot in the back of the head at the base of the skull through small holes in the wall that allowed a hidden SS officer to pass a gun through from another room. With this deception, the SS officers at Sachsenhausen murdered over 10,000 of these military prisoners in roughly eleven weeks. That’s almost one thousand people a week.
Learning about the utter precision of this soulless extermination literally made me sick to my stomach. Even many hours later, just thinking about it, I feel physically ill. For me, no other story about the Holocaust has, in such a clear way, made me understand the complete dehumanization of the persecuted groups that occurred at the time. I wholeheartedly wish that this particular lesson was one I did not have to learn, but I know that it was an important one, for me and for all of us.