So, I finally did it. Up until now I had left most of the 'Nazi' history of Germany alone, just getting to know earlier German history, but here is Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. It's about 30 minutes north of Berlin and was one of the first concentration camps - built in 1936.







I felt this note was significant. When...I think...they were building the Visitors' Center they found this note inside a bottle. The guy who wrote it talks about how he got to Sachsenhausen on 9 March 1937 and that now it was 19 April 1944 and that he still had hope..... ......









I don't know if this door is original, but it says 'Work makes (you) free' just like other concentration camps have.











These prisoner barracks were newly built by the Germans in 1944 - Sachsenhausen saw upwards to 200,000 prisoners come and die in a multitude of ways. The one that just left me cold was the description of SS military types bringing prisoners into a room. They had white 'doctor' coats on and would act like they were giving the prisoners physicals, when in reality they were just looking to see if the prisoner had gold in their teeth. The prisoner was escorted to another room (all the while loud music is being played) and the 'doctors' line the prisoner up against the wall acting like he'll measure how tall the prisoner is, just then another SS guy shoots the prisoner in the back of the head through a hole in the 'height strip' on the wall....yeah...I just sat there thinking 'I can't think....I don't know what to think right now...what? Huh?' Truly dumbfounded. And as if that wasn't bad enough, after the war the Soviets then used the camp to hold 60,000 German POW's, political prisoners, etc. A guy wrote that in these barracks at night they could hear the 'thump' from the bodies being thrown into the mass grave just a little ways away.



This was a bit of a shocker as well....that's a shooting range....where the Nazis would just shoot people, especially Russians and other Slavs. Pretty much if you had Slavic ancestry you could know fairly well that you'd be dead.
















This is the memorial to the victims of Sachsenhausen that is right by the crematoria. I don't know....what else is there to say? It's all true and I don't know what to do with it...