"Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp" Top 5 Page for this destination Oranienburg by Binegars1990

Sachsenhausen Concerntration Camp was built during the summer of 1936 by prisoners from the Emsland camps. It was the first new camp to be established after the appointment of Reichsfurer SS Heinrich Himmler as Chief of the German Police in July 1936. The complex was designed and laid out by an SS architect as a model for other concerntration camps. It was intended to give architectural expression to the Nazi world view and symbolize the subjugation of the prisoners to the absolute power of the SS. As a model camp used for training, located just outside the imperial capital, Sachsenhausen had a special status in the National Socialist concerntration camp system. This was reinforced in 1938 when the Concerntration Camps inspectorate (the administrative headquarters for all concertration camps in areas under German control) was transferred from Berlin to Oranienburg.

More thatn 200,000 people were imprisoned in Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp between 1936 and 1945. At first, the Nazi regime mostly imprisoned its political opponents there. Soon, they were joined in ever-increasing numbers by members of groups defined by national Socialist ideology as racially or biologically inferior and, after 1939, by more and more people form the occupied countries of Europe. Tens of thousands of them died of starvation, disease, forced labour and maltreatment, or were murderd systematically by the SS. Thousands of other prisoners died on death marches after the evacuation of the camp by SS at the end of April 1935. Around 3,000 prisoners, mostly the sick, but also doctors and assistants, who had been left behind in the camp were liberated by Soviet and Polish soldiers on 22nd and 23rd April 1945