in detail
On April 21, 1945, the evacuation of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp began. Of the 35,000 prisoners in the camp, which included women and children, 33,000 were set off on a march heading northwest.
Shortly before the camps were liberated, the National Socialists forced the prisoners who were halfway able to walk, on a death march to the north. 15,000 prisoners from Ravensbrück and about 33,000 from Sachsenhausen, sick, undernourished and only scantily clothed, had to march 40 kilometers by foot each day.
Travelling along different routes, the prisoner columns arrived in the vicinity of Wittstock. On April 23, 1945, over 16,000 prisoners were concentrated into a large camp situated not far from the Below Forest. While the SS camp leadership found lodging at nearby farms, the prisoners sought shelter from the cold in the woods camp in self-made dugouts and fox holes and tried to abate their hunger with herbs, roots and bark. One hundred and thirty-two of the prisoners who died in the woods camp and in the hospital are buried at the nearby cemetery in Grabow. The columns left the woods camp on April 29, 1945.
The Museum of the Death March, a branch of the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum, is located at the site of the woods camp in the Below Forest and is devoted to the subject of the death marches. The signs and inscriptions that the prisoners carved into the bark of the trees are still visible and are the last traces of their path of suffering.
The permanent exhibition in the museum, which opened in 1981, displays mostly objects that the prisoners left behind in the woods camp. In 1975 a simple memorial stone was replaced by a pillar with a red triangle and a memorial grove was established. Many of the trees on the 20,000 square meter woods bear inscriptions that were carved by concentration camp prisoners in April 1945.
April 1945
During a death march heading north from the Sachsenhausen and Ravensbrück concentration camps, 16,000 children, women and men arrive in the Below Forest on April 23, 1945, where they camp out until April 29, 1945. An estimated 700 people die during this period. 132 of them are buried in the nearby cemetery in Grabow. Numerous trees in the 20,000 square meter woods bear inscriptions carved by concentration camp prisoners.
1975
A simple memorial stone is replaced with a stele and red triangle and an honor grove is established.
1981
The museum opens with a permanent exhibition on the death marches and the woods camp in the Below Forest.
