Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial

Starting Point

Meet your guide on the square next to the Tränenpalast (Palace of Tears), Reichstagufer 17, 10117 Berlin. Please make sure you have your ABC 24-hour transport ticket, as well as some food and drink for the day – there is no opportunity to buy these once we arrive at the memorial.

Description

Over the nine years that the Nazis operated Sachsenhausen concentration camp, they incarcerated over 200,000 people. Some 45,000 of those interned here succumbed to exhaustion, undernourishment, disease, medical experimentation, and systematic extermination.

Established in 1936, Sachsenhausen was the first purpose-built camp to be set up under Heinrich Himmler, the new chief of the German Police. As such, it was conceived as a “model” structure, its grounds and buildings designed by Nazi architects with a view to subjugating prisoners to the absolute power of the SS. Initially intended to hold political prisoners, it later expanded to include individuals targeted due to their ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or disability, effectively becoming a training ground for the atrocities committed during the Holocaust.

Our expert guides will help you navigate this sombre and moving site, leading you on a tour of the memorial that takes in the barracks, the infirmary, the punishment cells, the execution grounds, the crematoria, the pathology laboratory, and the gas chamber.

You will be able to hear stories of individual prisoners, such as that of Yakov Dzhugashvili, son of Joseph Stalin, and of Georg Elser, who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939. High-profile prisoners at the camp also included a group of British Royal Marines commandos, who were forced to test German army equipment.

Your guide will explain how, as the war moved into its final phase, an unprecedented campaign of mass killings began, culminating in weakened survivors being forced into “death marches” away from the camp. The Soviet liberators then transformed Sachsenhausen into an internment camp for German prisoners of war and suspected war criminals, with some 60,000 inmates passing through the camp between 1945 and 1950.

It was not until 1961 that the East German authorities established a memorial here, and the tour concludes with a discussion of the way in which this dark past is commemorated by Germany today.

Finishing Point

The tour guide will accompany you back to central Berlin – either to Friedrichstraße train station or the Hauptbahnhof (central train station), depending on which route is most convenient on the day.

Donation

Insider Tour Berlin donates €3 per visitor to the Sachsenhausen Memorial authority for the upkeep and promotion of the site.