in detail
The Sachsenhausen concentration camp, erected by prisoners from the Emsland Camps in the summer of 1936, was the first new camp to be established after SS Reich Führer Heinrich Himmler was appointed to Chief of German Police in July 1936.
Its designed as a model camp, its extra funciton as a training camp for concentration camp commanders and prison guard personnel, and its close proximity to the Reich capital gave Sachsenhausen a special role within the concentration camp system, especially after the Concentration Camp Inspectorate was transferred from Berlin to Oranienburg in 1938.
From 1936-1945 more than 200,000 people were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp: first political opponents of the Nazi regime, later in increasingly large numbers, people who belonged to groups that the National Socialists had declared inferior. After the November Pogrom of 1938 around 6,000 Jews from Berlin and other areas of the German Reich were sent to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. With the outbreak of the Second World War on September 1, 1939, more and more cititzens of the occupied European countries were deported to Sachsenhausen. The prisoners were force to work as slave laborers in SS businesses and in about 100 concentratiion camp satellite camps for the armaments industry. In the penal commando situated close to the main camp which later became the Klinker satellite camp prisoners were supposed to produce construction material for the large scale building project in Berlin. The Klinerkerwerk became a place where intentional murder of individual prisoners and prisoner groups was carried out. The largest murder operation in the Sachsenhausen concentration took place from Septemer and November 1941 when the SS murdered more than 10,000 Soviet prisoners of war. Tens of thousands of prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentraiton camp died from starvation, disease, slave labor and maltreatment or were victims of the systematic extermination operations of the SS. On the Death Marches that followed the evacuation of the camp at the end of April 1945, another thousand prisoners died. Appproxately 3000 sick prisoners, camp doctors and care personnel, who had remained behind in the camp were liberated by Russian and Polish units of the Red Army on April 22, 1945.
Soviet Special Camp (1945-1950)
In August 1945 the Special Camp No. 7 of the Soviet Secret Service NKVD was transferred from Weesow (near Werneuchen) to Sachsenhausen to the area of the former protective custody camp. Most of the buildings with the exception of the crematorium and extermination facilities served the same functions as in the concentration camp.
The camp contained mostly functionaries of the Nazi regime but also political undesirables, arbitrarily arrested individuals and people sentenced by the Soviet Military Tribunal. By 1948 Sachsenhausen, as Special Camp no. 1 was the largest of three special camps in the Soviet zone of occupation. In Spring of 1950, the Soviet secret service closed the camp down and handed it over to the GDR authorities . Until then about 60,000 people, including men, women and children, mostly Germans, but also a large number of foreigners, endured prisoner life that was characterized by hunger, disease and tormenting inactiviity . More than 12,000 prisoners of the Speical Camp died of starvation and disease. They were buried naked and nameless in massgraves near the camp.
Sachsenhausen National Memoral Site (1961-1990)
For years the grounds were used by the Soviet army, the People's Police and the National People's Army of the GDR. In 1958 planning began for the construction of the national memorial site of Sachsenhausen. The official inauguration on April 22, 1961 was attended by a large number of citizens and state leaders of the GDR. Instead of preserving the remaining original structures, the planners decided on a monument design that would symbolize the "victory of antifascism." Only one building relic and reconsruction was integrated into the concept. The museums stressed the struggle of German communist resistance fighters above all, paying little attention to the persectution and extermination policies of National Socialism.
The Sachsenhausen Memorial and Musuem.
This is the name of the memorial since Janurary 1993 when it became a part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation , a non profit organization funded jointly by the Federal Republic of Germany and the state of Brandenburg. Since 1933 the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum has undergone a comprehensive process of renovation and new design. Bit by bit all the still remaining historical buildings and relicts of the former concentration camp are being preserved and restored as memorials. A decentralized exhbition concept calls for ten small permanent exhibitions to be presented in the original buildings in order to make visible the many layered history of the site. When the new design is complete, the Sachsenhausen memorial site will continue to be a place of mourning and commemoration but it will also be a modern contemporary history museum that conveys to coming generations a chapter of this past century's history that belongs to the cultural memory of humanity.
The following new permanent exhibitions are already open:
Museum "Barrack 38" : "Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 1936-1945", Museum "Barrack 39" : "The 'Daily Life' of prisoners in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, 1936-1945", The Prison Builidng of Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
Museum "Special Camp No. 7/ No. 1 (1945 to 1950)". “Medicine and Crime. The Infirmary of the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp 1936-1945” and “The City and the Camp. Oranienburg and the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp.”
The Memorial regards itself as a "site open for learning" and offers its visitors a multitude of opportunites to become engaged in the history of the stie. Visitors are invited to use the various information materials and medium, to work alone or in groups, independently or with a guide, to probe general questions, seek an indepth understanding, or research a particular question.
1936-37
1938-1945
200,000 prisoners from some 40 nations are imprisoned there.
April 22, 1945
3,000 prisoners are liberated by Russian and Polish troops.
1945-1950
Sachsenhausen is the largest internment camp in the Soviet Occupied Zone.
1961
The East German National Memorial Museum (Nationale Mahn- und Gedenkstätte) is inaugurated.
September 1992
Barracks 38/39 are set on fire by Neonazis.
1993
Work begins to remodel the "Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum/ Brandenburg Memorials Foundation" following the decentralized concept in which certain buildings and places are associated with particular historical events.
1997
Opening of "Barrack 38" with the permanent exhibition "Jewish prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1936-1945"
2001
Opening of the Museum "Barrack 39" with the permanent exhibition "The 'Daily Life' of prisoners in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, 1936-1945"
Opening of the Museum "Special Camp No. 7/ No. 1 (1945 to 1950)
