KZ Sachsenhausen

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Realizing that I only have a little over a month or so here in Berlin, and being reminded of the darkest period of German history, I decided, it would be good to visit one of the German concentration camps. Just north of Berlin is the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, which has been turned today into a memorial. It was a “perfect” day for such an outing too. Blustery fall winds and an overcast sky with a cold, unpleastant rain falling in the morning, which left a damp effect on the rest of the day, even after it cleared up.

I got to the town of Oranienberg about 2pm. The camp is about a two kilometer walk from the train station and I got to see a little bit of what small-town Germany is like. It has a typical small-town quaintness to it - nothing special or touristy, but small and close-knit and modest. What I could barely believe is that the houses went basically right up the camp and that it was built across the street from a good sized neighborhood. Whatever the Germans at the time said about no really knowing what was going on with the Holocaust must be taken with a huge grain of salt. I find it a little hard to believe that one could be completely unaware of what is going across across the street from one’s own neighborhood!

The camp is about as big as the Amherst college campus, not particulary big for a concentration camp, but holding several tens of thousands of prisoners (I think I saw somewhere that over a hundred thousand prisoners were held there, though I could not tell if that was over the course of the war or the maximum amount that was there at any one time). Many of the buildings were torn down by the Russian military, though several of the most important remain. The entry building, with its gate and the the darkly ironic and Orwell-esque words “Arbeit macht frei” (Work makes freedom) written over the gate still remains and is one of the most eerie things to walk through. Most of the buildings inside have either collapsed or were torn down by the Russians, leavng nothing more than the foundations and fireplaces, which gives the earie impression of a vast cemetery. The Soviets erected a huge obelisk-like granite monument in the center, which overlooks the whole camp and symbolizes its downfall as the new power dominates it.

Of the camp, the two most moving parts for me were Station Z and the prison block.

Station Z was the name given by the SS to the execution building, which is located just on the other side of the wall which circled the prisoners section of the camp. The name was a dark joke since it was the last station that many of the prisoners went to. Though the building itself was torn down by the communists, the foundations remain and are now housed under a large memorial roof structure. In front of the building is the execution trench where some thousands of people were murdered by firing squad or hanging. (This was about the point that I started tearing up - a condition which did not clear up until I arrived back home that night and comes back to me even as I write this). Station Z itself is actually very big. It is a testament to the dark efficiency of the SS that so many people were able to be murdered here. The station has only a small gas chamber. Most of the execuations were actually done by a trick in which victims were placed against a wall with a measuring rod on it, thinking they were going to be measured. Behind the wall was a small slit where a SS soldier in the other room could shoot them in the neck. That is one aspect of the Nazis that I find particularly despicable. In so many cases the victims did not even know that they were to be murdered and were tricked right up until their death. Even the gas chambers were made to look like shower rooms so that victims would not know their fate until it was too late.

The ashes of the victimes have been placed in little square mounds around the building and have little granite memorials in front of them for family members and friends to leave flowers. The Jewish custom (as we learned in Prague) is to leave rocks or pebbles on the grave, since it is believed to be wrong to leave things from the living world, like flowers, that the dead cannot enjoy. I picked up a small stone and left my own memorial rock there.

The other particularly moving part of the trip for me was the prison block where special prisoners were held in confinement (and often tortured as well). There was a special exhibit on one of Hitlers “personal prisoners,” a protestant minister named Heinrich Nöllmer (I need to check the spelling on that) who refused to join or play along with Hitlers Nazification of the church in Germany. He was not completely innocent though, having been fairly quiet while the Nazis hunted down communists, trade unionists, jews and so on, until they started “purifying” the church. What moved me most was the terrible caricture of the church that the Nazis set up, installing their own ministers where they could and crushing resistance. They came up with such ideas as Christians being “stormtroopers for Jesus” and a new theology that put the Führer over Christ himself. It was infuriorating to see how they twisted everything to fit their insane and evil world-view.

One thing that I keep thinking the more and more that I learn about the Nazi history is that they were, almost all of them, absolutely insane. I do not mean that in a psychological way or as an excuse, but the more I see of their plans for the world the more I am surprised that they were actually able to believe all of it! Hitler and his chief architect had plans to completely rebuilt Berlin, complete with monstrously huge monuments to the Reich. There were plans (quite advanced ones at that) to build a huge domed hall in the center of Berlin that would utterly dwarf the rest of Berlin, being about as tall as a modern skyscraper and almost as wide. The Nazi buildings were designed under the plan of “ruin theory” which planned to build buildings that would make for impressive ruins (like the Greeks and Romans) so that thousands of years later, they would be a testament to the third Reich. The Nazis really planned to essentially take over the world. And they made full plans for it. They planned to utterly alter society as history as known it to fit their own demented view of the world. It is terriflyingly amazing how close they got to pulling it off too.

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