Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp |
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Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was built by Emsland concentration camp prisoners in July 1936. It was the first new camp to be established after SS Heinrich Himmler was appointed Chief of the German Police. Designed by the SS architects, this was to be the ideal concentration camp setting to subjugate the prisoners to the absolute power of the SS. It served as a model for other camps that were to follow, and due to its location just outside the Reich capital of Berlin, Sachsenhausen acquired a special role in the concentration camp system.
Between 1936 and 1945 more 200,000 people had been imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. At first the prisoners were mostly political opponents of the Nazi regime but members of groups defined as racially or biologically inferior were imprisoned here. Large numbers of peoples from the occupied European states arrived by 1939 . Many thousands of people died of starvation, disease and mistreatment, forced labour or were victims of the operations of the SS systematic extermination of undesirables. At the end of April 1945, as the war was drawing to a close, thousands more died during the death marches following the evacuation of the camp. The camp was soon after liberated by Soviet an Polish soldiers and approximately 3,000 sick prisoners survived, along with the doctors and nurses who had stayed behind in the camp. The camp was not closed at this point in time most of the buildings were still used for the same purposes by the Soviets, , with the exception of the extermination facilities and crematorium. Nazi's, political undesirables, inmates and arbitrarily arrested prisoners sentenced by the Soviet military tribunal were held here. Sachsenhausen was the largest of three special camps in the Soviet Zone of Occupation by 1948. When the camp finally closed in the spring of 1950, approximately 60,000 people had been imprisoned there since the end of the war, at least 12,000 died of malnutrition and disease.
Sachsenhausen Books |