Sachsenhausen

Back from Berlin, I suspect that the memory that will endure when all the others have been washed away, is my trip to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp some twenty five miles north of the city near the town of Oranienburg. There was so much to learn, so much to read, so many pictures to study and testaments to listen to as well as imbuing the atmosphere of such a vast historical site.

Camp gate - "Work makes you free"

Before the summer of 1933, the area was just pine forest but as the National Socialists identified their perceived enemies, they needed somewhere to put them out of sight and out of mind. And so Sachsenhausen was conceived. At first it gathered in fellow Germans - socialists, communists, dissenters, criminals and these unfortunate men worked under duress to build the vast concentration camp with its many barrack huts, its concrete walls, drains, laundry, infirmary, industrial site, officers' houses, kitchens.

The thing snowballed as the Nazi machine rolled on. The camp became an invaluable training centre for the SS. In 1937, foreign visitors saw the gardens and some clean-shaven orderly prisoners but they didn't see the beatings or the shootings, the hunger, squalor or the unadulterated injustice of the place. Hangings, shootings, kickings increased to a point where ovens were required to reduce hundreds then thousands of human bodies to ash.

Gipsies were exterminated here, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, religious dissenters, trade unionists, academics and then of course the Jews who were often rolled straight on in to the camp, unloaded and killed with few of the longterm prisoners realising what was going on. Some of the ashes of these poor people were used as road building material. Prisoners with tattoos would often meet death prematurely so that their skin could be used for amusement - sometimes in lampshades.

I saw the mortuary and the evil autopsy slabs near the site of the brothel where specially drafted-in female prisoners were nourished, sometimes sun-lamped, dressed in finery and then systematically abused in a corridor of cell-like rooms. At least one was murdered for becoming pregnant. The most trusted senior prisoners could earn coupons to visit the brothel - it was seen as a way of making them more co-operative and productive.

The decaying remains of the SS officers' wooden mess

In the "New Museum" I saw a photograph from the camp commandant's special collection of an emaciated but very tall prisoner and a dwarf prisoner. For the commandant's amusement, these two men were instructed that they must always be together - at ablutions, on the parade ground, in the barrack room, everywhere, No one knows what happened to these men or indeed who they were or where they were from. They wore numbers like the rest.

In 1961, the East German government held a huge memorial service on the site and a vast column and statue were erected in memory of the 100,00+ who had perished at Sachsenhausen. The site does make the point very firmly that after the second world war, it continued to be a concentration camp run by the Soviet army. They rounded up Nazis, suspected Nazis and sympathisers and for a couple of years things seemed little different from how they had been during the Third Reich. Many died.

The monument erected by the DDR in 1961.

It makes you feel so humble, so grateful, so ashamed, so quiet, so small to visit a place like Sachsenhausen. The evil is still amongst us. It never went away. There under leaden skies which mercifully didn't spill their rain, I may have felt the spirit both of the frightened skeletal men and their jackbooted captors with their warped philosophies and their ice-cold hearts. There is so much else to be said about this grim place but to the hundred thousand gone I say - may you rest in peace and may your deathbells ring out through the centuries ahead as a warning to those who would again take civilisation into darkness.

The outer section where "special" prisoners were housed.