Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial - Half-Day Tour

While in the summer of 1936 the Olympic games were being celebrated and Nazi Germany pretended to be a peaceful and nonviolent regime - Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was being built as a prototype for political prisoners using forced labor. It was the first modern concentration camp to be established following the appointment of Reich SS Leader Heinrich Himmler in July of the same year. Planned on the drawing board of an SS architect, it was conceived as an ideal concentration camp giving architectural expression to the world view of the SS. The purpose of the camp was to exercise total and relentless terror constantly. We will go through the camp to feel and understand all the atrocities that took place there during 1936 and 1945. After the liberation of the camp by the Red Army, the atrocities, however, did not stop. The camp was used by the Soviets for another five years. In the early 1960s, the camp was turned into a memorial more for propaganda purposes than anything else.