Last week we went to a working camp named Sachsenhausen and I wanted to make a post about this place earlier but I couldn't find where the pictures wound up but I eventually found them last night. So without further ado, the most thought-provoking sight I have ever seen.
When I arrived to the camp I realized that I had pictured these camps as many times smaller than they actually were, these places are ginormous, absolutely massive. This specific camp would take hours to walk around, and some of the bigger camps like Auschwitz are 12-15x bigger. This is kind of a reminder of the scale of these places, they were designed for massive work output or death, this camp was designed for the earlier of the two options. The camp is centered around one central building known as Building A, this housed troops and a single massive machine gun which could virtually survey the entire camp, as it was designed to do so. As the population of the camp grew by upwards of ten fold, more housing was built and ultimately the design of this building no longer served its purpose because it could no longer survey the entire camp. Anyways, or tour guide brought us through the camp and pointed out places where the guards sometimes made prisoners, in almost no clothing, stand out in the winter cold until they were dead. This was probably the most astonishing killing method that I heard while I was there. Other methods included gassing, shooting, hanging and actually being beaten to death. One of their most popular methods was pretending to take a prisoners height as part of a physical exam, where to the prisoners surprise they would be shot in the back of the head by a solider hiding behind the scale, this method was used to kill over 12,000 Soviet Union soldiers in less than 6 weeks.
If you were lucky enough to not die here, the lasting pain of the horrible conditions would be enough to scar you for life. Barely any food, time to sleep, relax, talk, or even bath and shower are just part of the everyday reality at Sachsenhausen. The housing was so cramped that the ceilings would drip sweat as the humidity in these barracks was so high and they had no windows most of the time. People died every night in their barracks and in the morning their housing mates were expected to bring their bodies out to line up every morning.
There is so much more to talk about here, but to save on the history lesson I'll just end it by saying that no-one deserves this treatment, no one. As always thank you for reading and in the next post I hope to talk about something a little more uplifting.
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