Today is Holocaust Rememberance Day in Israel.
While living in Berlin, I’ve experienced the somber emotions that come with visiting a concentration camp. It takes about 30 mins to get to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp located in the quiet neighborhood of Oranienburg. THREAD

At Sachsenhausen, the Nazis would establish the administrative headquarters for all concentration camps in the regime, called the Concentration Camps Inspectorate.

Sachsenhausen was built in 1936; the first concentration camp built under the direction of Heinrich Himmler (pictured below). The atrocities committed here are almost too many to count, and Sachsenhausen was not even among the largest and most deadly of the concentration camps.

Between 1936 and 1945, more than 200,000 prisoners would pass through the forced labor camp. They were Jews, communists, homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and others the Nazis deemed undesirables from countries like Poland, France, Hungary, Romania, and the USSR.

The inmate population fluctuated between 11,000 to 48,000. On average, there were 3 men per bed in the dormitories (pictured below). An estimated 100,000 people died of starvation, disease, execution, medical experimentation, and the working conditions in the camp.

Every day life in the camp involved waking at 4:30am with roll call (pictured below). Often times, roll call would last more than four hours, not only because the Nazis enjoyed tormenting the inmates by exposing them to the elements (especially in winter)...

but because they did not allow roll call to end until every inmate was accounted for. This included hauling out the corpses of those who died since the previous roll call and placing them in a row behind the prisoners standing in formation.

Sometimes, guards would take the hats of inmates and throw them on the gravel near the fence. Prisoners knew they would be shot if they stepped on the gravel, but they were ordered to retrieve their hat or be shot on the spot. While retrieving the hat, the guards would open fire.

The conditions were so bad that some prisoners would charge at the electric fence surrounding the camp during roll call as an act of suicide.

While working at their various deployments, workers were instructed not to help other prisoners dying on the job because the slogan of the camp was “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates to “work makes you free,” or “work is liberation” in English.

Some prisoners had medical tests performed on them. Nazi doctors would give them concoctions of drugs, expose them to chemicals, or infect them with diseases to see how human bodies react to the substances in hopes that they could be used to help the Nazi soldiers and war effort.

Others were required to walk/run 46km (more than a marathon), and do different exercises along the way, to test different shoes’ and clothes’ durability for Nazi military garb. (Shoe testing track pictured below)

Sachsenhausen had its own crematorium and execution area, called “station Z” because inmates entered through the gate underneath “tower A.” The 4 ovens (present-day picture below) could burn up to 6000 corpses in a day.

Mass graves were found throughout the 90s and early 2000s because tests on the soil in the camp found thick layers of human ash. They estimate more than 7000 victims ashes were dumped in these various mass graves. (Execution trench adjacent to mass graves pictured below)

In the fall of 1941, 13,000 Soviet POWs were systematically executed via gassing and other forms of execution. The most chilling is the use of the Genickschussanlage, which means “neck shooting facility” in English.

This facility would include a room with a measuring device. Think along the lines of the type mounted against a wall in a doctor's office. The Germans told the Soviet POWs this was part of processing them upon entering the camp.

As these Soviet soldiers stood against the measuring stick, a narrow slot in the device allowed an executioner to shoot the prisoner in the neck from a booth behind the wall (actual device pictured below).

To keep the other prisoners from finding out what was going on, the Nazis played music to drown out the gunshots. The dead bodies were moved by other prisoners to another room, stripped of anything valuable (gold teeth, etc.), and then cremated. The process was then repeated.

When it was determined it was only a matter of time before Russian and Polish troops descended on Sachsenhausen to liberate the camp, the Nazis tried to relocate every prisoner strong enough to walk in another concentration camp.

They left 3,000 too malnourished to make the journey to die, but we’re liberated days later by Russian and Polish forces on April 22, 1945.

When prisoners could no longer keep walking on these death marches (pictured below), the SS executed them where they stood, and the prisoners would have to walk over the dead bodies of their fellow captives.

Later, the USSR would reuse the Nazi infrastructure to create their own camp for its political prisoners. They called it Special Camp No. 7, and it was in operation from 1945-1950.

Sachsenhausen was one of 42,500 Nazi ghettos, slave labor sites, concentration camps and killing factories set up throughout Europe identified by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

It’s undeniably difficult to visit places like Sachsenhausen. It’s emotionally draining, & visiting a concentration camp might not be something you expect to do on your joyful, European getaway, but it’s incredibly important that we visit these sites to learn about the history...

and reflect upon it if we are truly committed to the concept of #NeverAgain. I firmly believe learning about the Holocaust beyond what I’ve been taught in the classroom has made me more reflective and better person. I hope by reading this, others are challenged to do the same.