Yesterday we went to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. It was one of the most interesting and disturbing places that I have ever been. Sachsenhausen was built in 1936 and served mainly as a prison work camp for the Nazi regime during their reign. Sachsenhausen was used primarily for political prisoners but also imprisoned other groups such as Jews, homosexuals, and other minorities. It imprisoned more than 200,000 prisoners during its 9 years in operation but was finally liberated by the Soviets on April 22nd, 1945. The living conditions that these people endured is nauseating. We toured the camp while our guide tried to give us an idea of a typical day for these prisoners. Sometimes up to 500 prisoners were living in one barracks not much bigger than a building the size of two double-wide trailers. They almost always had large amounts of lice living with them and had to share 10 toilets and one sink for all of them. They were fed a bowl of soup, two small pieces of bread, and coffee (boiled acorns) in the morning and at night. These two small meals only amounted to 300 calories which is an unbelievable number since they were forced to work hours on end. To put this into perspective for fat Americans, a Big Mac from McDonald’s has 540 calories by itself. We walked around the camp and saw numerous different torture devices that the SS officers used against the prisoners. Probably the most sickening ones for me was a bunker in the ground where they would put up to 12 prisoners and either fill it with sand, water, or simply let them starve to death. Another cruel method they would use is hanging people by their feet which caused death after a few agonizing days of hanging. The most eerie part of the camp was a placed called “Station Z.” Although Sachsenhausen was not a so-called “death camp,” they built Station Z specifically to murder and burn prisoners. We were told a story of 13,000 Soviet prisoners-of-war that were brought to Sachsenhausen, but there was not enough room for them in the camp. They were taken to Station Z one by one and executed. They were measured, taken into a small room, had their back against a slit in the wall according to their height, and shot in the back of the head by an SS officer. They used this method so that the soldier didn’t have to ever see the prisoner’s face. They also used a soft lead bullet so the there would be no exit wound and a smaller clean up. After they cremated the bodies, there was over 2 tons of ash. The last part of our tour ended at the “medical facilities” which were also used for medical experiments such as testing antibiotics and drugs like speed. They also used these facilities for torture experiments also. For instance, they would shoot prisoners in different areas of the body and see how long it took them to die. It was very nauseating as well to see the actual tables in which they conducted these experiments. I asked the tour guide if there was specific prisoners that they picked for these experiments and tortures and he said almost always Jews and gypsies. This is ironic because the Nazi’s believed that these people were not even human or in the same category of life as them, so it is ironic that they would perform tests on them.
bendecelle 