| An early camp, Sachsenhausen was built in 1936 in Oranienburg, on the northern outskirts of Berlin. At first it primarily held political prisoners, but later other groups that the Nazis identified as dangerous or inferior were also sent there. Intended to be a model for other concentration camps, it was constructed on strict geometrical lines, with the interior camp forming a semi-circle enclosed in the equalateral triangle formed by the stone walls. Like Dachau, it served as a kind of school for concentration camp personnel. Between 1936 and its liberation by the Red Army on April 27, 1945, around 200,000 persons were imprisoned there, approximately half of whom died or were murdered while at Sachsenhausen. The pictures below were taken on June 24, 2000. |
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Prison cells at Sachsenhausen. With the exception of the eastern camps devoted exclusively to murder (Chelmno, Belzec, Sobibor, and Treblinka) most of the major camps had facilities for incarceration-prisons within prisons. | |
| Entrance gate to Sachsenhausen. Arbeit Macht Frei-"Work will set you free"-is a motto first used at Dachau. The idea there, and here at Sachsenhausen, was that loiterers and "work-shy" Germans who had been arrested would have a shorter stay at the concentration camp if they developed the habit of working. The words can also be found above gates in Terezin and, most infamously, at Auschwitz I. Although few Jews killed at Auschwitz II (Birkenau) saw the sign, its association with this most deadly of camps has made it one of the most chillingly ironical phrases of our century. |
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