Today we had an excursion with school to go to Sachsenhausen, which was a concentration camp in Berlin. Well it's a little bit outside of Berlin, I guess technically it's Oranienburg. But you can still take the S Bahn there so I consider it Berlin. Oh how I love the public transportation here :)
Initially it was used by the Nazis until the end of the war as a camp for political prisoners. After the end of the war, the Soviets occupied it until 1950 as a work camp. And now it's a museum, or what's left of it. Over 30,000 inmates died there from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition, etc. Towards the end of the war, the Soviet's POWs were brought there...10,000 of the 13,000 were killed immediately. The rest were forced to work. When the camp received word that the Allies were getting close, they lined up all their prisoners and proceeded to march them out of the city. It literally was a death march. They were exhausted already. If they collapsed, they were shot immediately. Most of them didn't survive the march.
Of course they had death trenches and crematoriums. They have memorials for the mass graves that they discovered about 20 years ago. One of the barracks they had set up as it was back then. It wasn't as traumatic as Auschwitz-Birkenau for obvious reasons, but it still was very depressing. I felt like I received a lot more detail at Sachsenhausen. I also had an audio guide, so that's probably why. We were able to walk the entire grounds, which really put it into perspective just how large it was! I think the memorial was probably my favorite part, if you can have a favorite part of a concentration camp.
After today, I think I've seen enough concentration camps for awhile. I believe it's important to see them and realize what happened there, but it's too depressing to do anymore.
