Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp, Day 7

This morning we all met at 8:30 to travel to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp in Oranianburg. The Sachsenhausen Concentration camp was a working camp and not a death camp, such as Auschweiz, but still many deaths occurred within the walls of the camp. The majority of the deaths in the camp were related to both the extremely harsh working conditions and also the random acts of violence committed by the Staasi in the camp. Near the end of the war prisoners were killed by mass murder by gas chambers and by being shot, this particular camp was mainly a working camp. All around the area where the barracks for the prisoners were there were different factories where the prisoners would go to work every day. The barracks contained a room lined with toilets, and a room filled with beds that were three beds tall and room enough to shuffle sideways down the rows. We were told this served many purposes including allowing the rapid spread of disease and making it difficult for prisoners to sleep, which contributes to the physical and mental exhaustion.

The weather must have known that we would be going to a place that weighed heavily with misery and sorrow because when we left it was already raining, and it didn’t stop for the entirety of our time at the camp and everyone was freezing from the wind and rain. Even though I was shivering from the cold, I kept thinking to myself, ‘you have no right to complain about being cold here. The prisoners of this camp would have been wearing less clothes, had less to eat, and didn’t have the comfort of knowing they could just go back inside to warm up’. It is incredibly difficult to fathom the life of one of the prisoners between the brutality of the working conditions, the humiliation from the staasi, and the demoralizing knowledge that your only hope for refuge was through death. Even if someone from the nearby village were to try to help a prisoner, the villager would be imprisoned as well.

In interesting observation was brought up in our group discussion later about the parallels between the Concentration Camp and the United States and our history of slavery. One of the first things that was talked about was how the whole concentration camp we visited was a memorial for the prisoners who had died in the camp, but there aren’t any memorials for the slaves who were imprisoned in colonial America. There are many parallels that can be made between the treatment and working conditions of the slaves on plantations and the prisoners in the Sachsenhausen and other Concentration Camps that were designed for forced labor, yet the decisions on how to deal with the memorialization of the two groups has been vastly different between America and Germany. The German government has made sure that memorials were kept and German citizens seem to be open to discussions about German history. It will be interesting to see what decision is made about whether the confederate flag and whether Americans will be able to continue to fly it with the American flag.