Remembering Sachsenhausen

I arrived safely in Berlin Saturday morning.  I was very disappointed with the flight. It was nothing like the superb service on my trips to Hong Kong where I had my own personal, working TV and a hot breakfast before landing.  I’m hoping that this was due to the fact that the flight time was so much shorter and not a reflection of the recent merger of Continental into United Airlines. 

Flying into Berlin, I was surprised to see flat, open farm land and not a lot of development around the city. The area around our nation’s capital is densely populated for hundreds of miles.  I also couldn’t help but think that the sound of airplanes flying over Berlin 70 years earlier had a much different connotation.

I must admit that I was quite intimidated going into the first leg of the trip.  I’ve never had to navigate a foreign country on my own, especially not the bus system.  On a train, one can count the stops and the train stops at its scheduled stops no matter what; but on a bus, the stops aren’t always announced and you must signal to get off.  I’m happy to report that Berlin’s bus system is the easiest I have ever ridden.  The stops are clearly announced and displayed and the bus stops themselves have a digital sign board to tell you the estimated time until the next departure.  I very quickly made it from the airport to the hotel which was essential as timing was of the essence if I was going to be able to fit in a tour to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial.

My grandfather talked of his experience visiting the concentration camps in the closing days of World War II and I thought it was important to take some time from my vacation to remember those who had lost their lives in the atrocity. 

The town of Sachsenhausen lies about an hour north of Berlin. The camp was completed in July of 1936 and served as a model for all future camps. All concentration camp activities during the Nazi regime were run from this location.  It was built in a pyramidal configuration, symbolic of the hierarchy of the Nazi Regime with SS chief Heinrich Himmler’s quarters at the top of the pyramid, the entrance to the camp, and the barracks for the Jewish prisoners at the bottom of the pyramid.

Like everyone else, I’ve studied the holocaust, watched the movies and seen the pictures.  However, walking through the camp and thinking about how many brutal and senseless murders took place directly on the ground that was under my feet was a very moving and hallowing experience.  The irony is, that in its current form as a memorial, not all of the buildings have been reconstructed and their foundations are outlined in stones, the area is quite peaceful – open with tall, graceful pine trees in the background.  Our tour guide, Rob, urged us to juxtapose this particular bright, sunny, warm day against a frigid, grey winter day when it was a working camp.  He asked us to think about the screams of  the human beings who were tortured, the smell of death and decay and the feel of the ashes of the incinerated bodies as it fell from the sky.

We started our tour down Camp Street, a public thoroughfare for the town, meant to serve as a determent, stopping at the building used to train the SS Guards, which currently, and somewhat unnervingly, is the location for training Berlin’s police force.

Rob explained that one of the original purposes of the camps was to provide slave labor for the big businesses who actually help to put the Nazi’s into power. 

From there, we walked pass the ruins of the SS Casino, where the guards went for R & R and entered the main gate, through Tower A and into the camp.  The pyramid design of the camp allowed the guards to see everything from this tower.  Within the tower, there originally stood an ominous nest of machine guns.  However, the psychological terror instilled within the prisoners was so great that the guns never even needed to be loaded.

We spent some time wandering around the restored Jewish barracks which contained interactive displays giving information on some of the prisoners who were able to survive Sachsenhausen and live to tell their story. 

The barracks were directly next to the camp prison.  It’s hard to believe that there could be something worse than the conditions already described to us, but the Nazi’s found a way to do it.  Some individuals detained in the prison were political and spiritual leaders who the Nazi felt that they could not kill for fear of starting an uprising to protest.  Stalin’s son was in fact imprisoned here.  Others were tortured in the prison so that their screams, which echoed over the prison walls, would instill fear in the other Sachsenhausen detainees.

In the center of the camp was the boot training track.  This was a semi circle of different kinds of terrain – slabs of slate, large rocks, gravel, sand and dirt. Prisoners on boot testing detail were forced to run the track for 40 km per day to test the durability of new Nazi boot designs. The average life expectancy of someone on boot detail was a mere eleven days.

Behind the track was a memorial where the gallows once stood. During the holiday season, the Nazis would place their Christmas tree here. At about this point in the tour, I started thinking about Sachsenhausen in relationship to my recent trip to Alcatraz.  The prisoners at Alcatraz were incarcerated because the knowingly and of their own free will committed acts that sent them to prison.  In comparison to the conditions at Sachsenhausen, whose prisoners were mostly upstanding and moral members of society arbitrarily placed their on orders of a madman, Alcatraz prisoners were treated like royalty.

The most chilling and moving part of the tour were the execution trench, Station Z and the crematorium. It is still beyond my comprehension as to how one human being could arbitrarily execute thousands of others, but I guess that the Nazi’s were masters in creating a type of subverse psychology that produced the SS soldiers.  At one point in history, they decided that the execution trench was inhumane, not for those being executed, but instead for the SS soldier pulling the trigger.  After that point, the Nazi’s created an elaborate scheme in which they systematically executed Soviet POW’s one at a time under the pretext that they were being examined by a doctor.  In three months time, they executed 10,000 Soviet soldiers.

Obviously, Sachensenhausen was a difficult experience, but I think it is important to take time to remember the black marks in history in the hopes that we can prevent them from happening again.  Walking back through this very quaint, peaceful town, it’s hard to believe that the houses were originally built for the SS guards.

I went back to the hotel to meet Robin after her conference ended for the day and we sent out to explore some of the western part of the city.  It was still daylight so we walked through the Zoologicher Garten to the Siegessaule Groser Stern passing several of Germany’s famous beer gardens.  We passed the Europa Center, Germany’s first high rise which opened in 1965. 

We also stopped in the Kaufhaus des Westerns (KaDeWe) which claims to be the biggest department store in the entire Continent. We were hoping to get dinner on its seventh floor, glass-domed cafeteria but we arrived a little too late.  Instead, we found a German pub in which we were able to get some delicious beef goulash.

As is I wasn’t jet lagged enough, daylight savings time took effect in Europe Saturday night so I lost yet another hour of sleep.  That’s okay, there’s plenty of time for that next week after my vacation is over.