Sachsenhausen 🏡

“Before Auschwitz, There Was This”

Germany | June 2025

Before this trip, I had never even heard of Sachsenhausen. That fact alone haunted me.

We talk about Auschwitz. We talk about Birkenau. But Sachsenhausen — one of the first Nazi concentration camps and a model for many that followed — is often left out of the conversation. Why? Maybe because it’s located in a peaceful, scenic town just north of Berlin — Oranienburg — where tourists sip coffee and locals walk dogs. But that’s the thing about the Holocaust: it didn’t only live in places that look haunted. It infected the ordinary, too.

Sachsenhausen opened in 1936 and was intended to be a “model” camp — which just makes it sound even more chilling. It wasn’t just a place of punishment. It was a training ground for SS officers. It was where techniques were tested before being rolled out elsewhere. This was not a hidden failure of humanity. It was a system, perfected.

There is a gate that greeted prisoners — including Jewish people — as they arrived at Sachsenhausen. The iron lettering reads “Arbeit macht frei,” which translates to “Work sets you free.” But that was a lie. A cruel, calculated lie. No one was truly set free from this place — most never left alive. And that’s what makes it so heartbreaking.

What kind of evil does it take to put that phrase above the entrance of a death camp?

It was psychological warfare — meant to manipulate, to offer false hope, to strip people of their dignity while pretending survival was possible. But it wasn’t. The Nazis were pure evil personified. They didn’t just kill the body — they tried to crush the spirit. And that process began the moment you walked through those gates.

⚠️ The Geometry of Terror

The camp’s layout was designed like a triangle, with Tower A — the central SS watchtower — placed at its apex so guards could survey the entire camp at once. There was no escape, not even from the gaze. Every movement, every breath was watched.

We stood on the Appellplatz — the roll call area — where prisoners were forced to line up, often for hours, in the freezing cold or blistering heat. The space was wide and flat, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that the ground itself remembered.

Right in the middle stands the Liberation Monument — a massive sculpture placed where lives were ended. It doesn’t soften the horror. It doesn’t try to. It just stands there — demanding we not look away.

🔥 The Crematoriums & Pietà Memorial

Inside the former crematorium building, the air felt heavier. The walls close in. The rooms where bodies were burned, the execution trench, the site of mass shootings — they weren’t just historical facts. They were spatial memories. You could feel them.

In the same room was a statue by Waldemar Grzimek — a Pietà-style memorial: a grieving figure cradling a limp body. Seeing that sculpture next to the ovens was… indescribable. Its grief cast in stone. It’s memory refusing to be buried.

💡 What Hit Me Hardest

Sachsenhausen is where Nazis experimented with extermination techniques, where SS guards were trained before being sent to Auschwitz and beyond. This was the prototype. It was also where Soviet POWs were slaughtered, where “medical” experiments were done, and where prisoners were forced to work themselves to death in the name of Nazi efficiency.

Everything about it was structured. Precise. Calculated.

And yet — today — it’s surrounded by trees, nature trails, and the sounds of life.

That contrast disturbed me more than I expected.

📍 First Stop, But Far From Forgotten

This was our first camp visit, followed by Auschwitz and then Birkenau. But in many ways, Sachsenhausen was the foundation for all that followed. Walking through it, I realized how easily cruelty can be organized, how quickly oppression can become normalized — and how quiet the world can be in the face of both.

If this was the blueprint, what does that say about how far the Nazis were willing to go from the very beginning?

🧠 Final Reflection

What scares me is that I didn’t know about Sachsenhausen before. That silence — that exclusion — is part of the danger. We can’t only talk about the “main” camps. We must talk about all of them. We must talk about the systems that made them possible — and the people who walked past, looked away, or did nothing.

Sachsenhausen taught me that remembrance doesn’t just mean honoring those who died. It means exposing every layer of the machine that killed them — so it never turns on again.