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Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp
boot-testing track
arson damage to barracks 38 and 39
death march memorial plaque - between fall 1944 and april 1945, to remove evidence of concentration camps and prevent the repatriation of POWs, the Nazis forced hundreds of thousands of prisoners from the concentration camps and prisoner of war camps inside Germany away from front lines and allied forces.
barracks used for medical testing
bunks inside barracks
main entrance to the camp
Jewish barracks
Crematorium
memorial
execution trench
Facts about Sachsenhausen (German pronunciation: [zaksənˈhaʊzən])
- political prisoners
- in use from 1936 - May 1945
- 22 miles north of Berlin
- training camp for SS officers
- prisoners executed here, especially Soviet prisoners of war
- "Hierarchy" of prisoners - criminals (such as rapists and murders), Communists, homosexuals, and lastly Jews
- Until 1943, executions by shooting or hanging
- prisoners used in nearby brickworks to rebuild Berlin or airplane manufacturing plant
- not originally planned as an extermination camp
- by 1942, large number of Jewish prisoners sent from here to Auschwitz
- gas chamber and ovens constructed in 1943
- also site of largest counterfeiting operation - British and American currency
- due to poor living conditions, 30,000 inmates died from exhaustion, disease, malnutrition
- many were executed or died as result of brutal medical experimentation
- over 100 Dutch resistance fighters were executed here
- after the war the Soviets used the camp for Nazi and Soviet political prisoners
- By the time the Soviet camp closed in the spring of 1950, at least 12,000 had died of malnutrition and disease
-mass graves from the Soviet period were found in 1990
-Neo-Nazis have vanadalized the compound several times. September 1992, barracks 38 and 39 were severely damaged in an arson attack.
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