Most Nazi concentration camps were located in occupied territories far away from ordinary Germans, but Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was just 45km north of Berlin on the outskirts of the picturesque town of Oranienburg.

The camp was founded in 1936 by SS leader Heinrich Himmler, who wanted a ‘modern, up-to-date, ideal and easily expandable concentration camp’. What he got was a murder machine that would claim the lives of more than 30,000 prisoners. Sachsenhausen’s notoriety did not end with the collapse of the Nazi regime at the end of the war; their Soviet victors used it for five years, killing 12,000 of their own prisoners.

During the visit, you will see the SS training camp, the yard command, ‘Tower A’, the barracks, the prison camp, the gallows, the kitchen and laundry, the pit and a photographic exhibition among others. The camp was notable for the number of high-profile prisoners such as former prime ministers of France, Norway and Austria, a Grand Prix champion and Stalin’s son.

Sachsenhausen was also the location of one of the largest counterfeiting operations during the war, in which prisoners were forced to produce fake British and American banknotes in an attempt to make the Allied economies unstable. This criminal enterprise was dramatised in the Oscar-winning film The Counterfeiters. Learn about this and other aspects of camp life such as the prisoners’ routine, the forced labour they performed such as the shoe-testing track and the brutal punishments meted out to them.
 



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