Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen

Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen

The Memorial and Museum Sachsenhausen commemorate the over 130,000 prisoners from all over Europe, held captive in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. During that time, over 20,000 prisoners perished due to the poor living and working conditions in the camp, or were murdered by the SS.

History

Opened in 1936, Sachsenhausen concentration camp had a special place within the concentration camp system. Located in close proximity to the German capital, it was a model camp and a training camp. From 1938, the administrative headquarters of the SS for all concentration camps was located in Oranienburg. Until 1939, the prisoners of Sachsenhausen were for the most part Germans. Their main task was the construction of the camp itself. When the war began, more and more prisoners were brought from the occupied states to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Many of them had to perform forced labour in SS workshops or for German companies. They worked under harsh conditions at production sites for the arms industry supporting the war economy of the Third Reich. Especially after 1942, many new satellite camps and commandos of Sachsenhausen concentration camp were established at arms factories. At the end of January 1945, the camp was hopelessly overcrowded due to thousands of new prisoners arriving from camps in the East - there were more than 56,500 prisoners in the camp at the time. Many of them were deported to the Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt concentration camps shortly afterwards. On April 21, 1945, the SS began evacuating Sachsenhausen concentration camp and its satellite camps. Over 33,000 prisoners were forced on a death march towards the Baltic coast. According to statements of the last camp commander, Anton Kaindl, the prisoners were supposed to be loaded onto ships at the Bay of Lübeck which was to be sunk in the Baltic Sea. The approximately 3,000 prisoners who remained in the camp were liberated by the Red Army on April 22, 1945. Between 1945 and 1950, the Soviet special camp No. 7/ No. 1 was located in what had been the core of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Around 60,000 German civilians were interned in the barracks by the Soviet secret service NKVD. At least 12,000 did not survive their imprisonment.

Sachsenhausen, around 1939, Roll call, in foreground right, barrel of machine gun on »Tower A«, Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen

Sachsenhausen, 2006, »Tower A«, former entrance to the prison camp and office of the SS camp admnistration, Stiftung Denkmal

Victims

Soviet and Polish prisoners constituted the largest groups in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. The political prisoners in the camp consisted of communists, trade unionists, social democrats, Christians and Jehova's Witnesses. The SS also imprisoned people who were persecuted on social and on racial grounds in Sachsenhausen. The first group consisted of, amongst others, people considered »asocial«, »work shy«, and »professional criminals«, and over a thousand homosexuals. The group persecuted on racial grounds consisted of Sinti and Roma and from 1944 onwards increasingly Jews. Arrested resistance fighters from occupied territories of Europe were also brought to Sachsenhausen by the SS. Many of the camp's prisoners died of hunger, illness, forced labour and abuse, or they fell victim to extermination operations of the SS. Thousands of prisoners died on death marches following the camp's evacuation, either due to exhaustion or because they were shot by the SS guard troops. In all, over 130,000 people were incarcerated in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp between 1936 and 1945. Over 21,000 of them perished.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

In 1961, the third national memorial of the GDR - following Buchenwald in 1958 and Ravensbrück in 1959 - was established at the site of the former camp and headquarters of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Since 1993, the memorial is part of the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation. A year prior to that, extreme right-wingers had destroyed two of the prisoners' barracks which had been reconstructed in 1961. In 1994, large-scale renovations began and the former concentration camp site was redesigned. Building and relics remaining from the days of National Socialism were renovated. The barracks which had been damaged during the arson attack were redeveloped or replaced by new museum buildings. Since 2001, a newly conceptualised permanent exhibition as well as temporary exhibitions have been displayed in the »New Museum«. In April 2008, a permanent exhibition on the history of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp was opened in the renovated building of the former prisoners' kitchen. This exhibition is the core of the new exhibition concept, which entails that the different parts are spread out over the entire camp site. The realisation of the concept was possible after years of reconstruction efforts. Part of the exhibition is a death book, which lists the names and hometowns of the 20,500 prisoners who perished in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp and its satellite camps.

Oranienburg, 1938, Prisoners of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, USHMM

Oranienburg, 2006, Central monument of the »National Memorial« from the 1960s, in front of it a sculpture entitled »Liberation«, Stiftung Denkmal

Possibilities

Permanent exhibitions, learning centre for school groups, cinema for screening of documentaries, selection of workshops on various topics concerning history and commemoration

Open

Daily from 8.30 a.m. to 6.30 p.m.
Library and archive Tuesdays to Thursdays 8.30 a.m. to 4.30 p.m.. The museums, library and archive are closed on Mondays.

Contact

https://www.sachsenhausen-sbg.de/

besucherdienst@gedenkstaette-sachsenhausen.de

+49 (0)3301 200 200

Straße der Nationen 22
16515 Oranienburg

Oranienburg, 2006, Former watch tower and barbed wire on the area of the memorial, Stiftung Denkmal

Oranienburg, 2006, Group of sculptures in front of the former crematorium and execution site »Station Z«, Stiftung Denkmal

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