Sachsenhausen

On Thursday, Ben and I took a guided tour out to Sachenhausen Concentration Camp. Apparently this was the first camp and the one that all others were modeled after. It started in the late 30s with political prisoners (mostly Communists) and actual convicts. Then others were sent there and persecuted just for being...some Christians, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and finally Jews. It started to rain as soon as the tour started at the camp and didn't stop...but it seemed a rather appropriate backdrop to such a sobering place.

Tower A was the entrance to the camp

This is the gate in tower A -- 'work makes you free'. It was this idea that had so many outsiders 'duped'...they believed that people were simply being reformed by being made to work.

this stone marks the entrance to what used to be Barrack 40 -- one of the Jewish barracks

a memorial at Station Z -- the crematorium

This huge concrete column was built by the Communists in the 50s as a memorial to their comrades that were persecuted at the camp. It was interesting to hear that the Communists continued to use the camp with the same purpose until the mid-50s when they shipped all their 'workers' back to the USSR. They also opened Sachsenhausen as the 1st Concentration Camp memorial in 1962...but they only recognized the political prisoners (namely Communists) as the ones that were persecuted here. Their admission of the death of the detainment and death of Jews did not come til years later.