Sachsenhausen is something to remember

This tour is suitable for those people who are interested in the history of Nazi Germany, the Holocaust, the concentration camp system. It will be especially interesting for people who already know a lot, have watched documentaries, but would like to see it firsthand, not in photos. It is especially useful for children for educational purposes.

In 1933, one of the first concentration camps was established in Oranienburg, immediately after Hitler came to power on January 30, 1933. After the Reichstag arson on February 28, 1933, the Decree “On the Protection of the People and the State” was published, it was presented as exceptional, but, in fact, it annulled the basic civil rights of man and, under the guise of protecting the population from “traitors of the Communists”, representatives of the state authorities put political and ideological opponents in camps without trial and investigation. One of these early camps was Oranienburg. Now in Sachsenhausen there is a separate museum dedicated to the stories of political prisoners since 1933 with equally horrific fates.

Based on this early camp, Sachsenhausen concentration camp was founded in 1936. The Nazis did not classify him as a death camp like Auschwitz, for example, but hundreds of thousands of prisoners died here of starvation, cold, overwork, disease, medical experiments, or were killed by Nazi executioners.

In the early years of the camp, it held mostly German political prisoners. But as Nazism in the country grew, the number of prisoners constantly increased and, if in 1937 there were 2,500 people, then after Kristallnacht on November 10, 1938, the number increased 3 times due to the newly arrived Jews. Sachsenhausen eventually became a place of confinement for Jews, gypsies, disabled people, homosexuals, and countless priests. And since 1939, the camp was replenished by prisoners from the occupied territories, including a huge number of Soviet soldiers. Among the significant figures here was imprisoned the son of J. V. Stalin – Yakov Dzhugashvili, as well as General Karbyshev.

Concentration camp prisoners worked for long grueling hours, living conditions were terrible, prisoners worked in military factories, on construction work. One unique activity was the well-established production of counterfeit money: the best artists and swindlers were collected from all concentration camps, who in Sachsenhausen forged American and British currencies.

On the tour you will see real barracks in which the prisoners lived, including a hospital barracks, where they conducted experiments on people, a track for testing shoes, on which prisoners with heavy bags on their shoulders had to test shoes for strength. You will also see the moat in which Soviet soldiers were killed and the place where there were once gas chambers and furnaces.

It is also interesting that Sachsenhausen was an exemplary demonstration camp in which “cadres” for future or existing concentration camps were trained and retrained, so one can only imagine how “unsweet” people lived there. Nevertheless, even here there was a hotbed of resistance, which was a well-conspired underground committee, which was able to hide the fact of its existence even from the Gestapo. I will tell you more about this and other resistances on excursions, including about the Jewish doctor Efin Hook, who, risking his life, provided medical care to prisoners in barracks.

On April 21, 1945, Operation Death March began. The Nazis planned to transfer more than 30,000 prisoners to the Baltic coast, immerse them on barges, take them to the open sea and flood them. Those who were behind and had no more strength to go further were shot. The Nazi plans were not realized thanks to the Soviet troops who liberated people in 1945 in early May.

In August 1945, Sachsenhausen became “Special Camp No. 7” of the NKVD – former Wehrmacht officers, their families, former members of the National Socialist Party were kept here. We will visit a museum dedicated to these events.

This tour is quite heavy, but, nevertheless, one of the most revealing and informative. On the tour you will learn in detail about:

• One of the first concentration camps
• Exemplary demonstration camp
• The place of imprisonment of the son of Stalin (as well as General Karbyshev, leaders of the Ukrainian nationalists Bandera, Stetsko).