Berlin trip- Part 2: Wednesday Daytime

Our first stop for the day was Checkpoint Charlie. That’s the border whereby people get to cross over from either West/ East Germany daily in the past. However, in August 1961, the border was closed. The Berlin Wall was erected to prevent Eastern Germans from going over to the Westside for a period of 28 years.

There was nothing much to see at Checkpoint Charlie. It was basically just a hut in the middle of a busy street. We went off to the Brandenburg gate to join a daily tour group after that. We were going to visit a concentration camp. In a morbid sense, how cool is that? Most people back home only get to read about the world wars in history books.

We had 2 tour guides- Brian & Jesse. Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was about 1hr’s train journey followed by a 40min bus ride out of Berlin.

Learnt a lot of stuff over there. There’s so much stuff I want to type out in my blog, but I don’t think I can fit everything in…

That’s the entrance of the camp. The time on the clock tower is permanently at 11.07am, the time at which Soviet & Polish forces came to rescue the prisoners from the clutches of the Nazis.

(I still can’t pronounce that name, have to ask Auds to keep repeating it to me. Both Cas & Auds take German modules) camp imprisoned different groups of people during different time frames.

1933-1934: The camp was a key site in the persecution of the opposition during the months after the National Socialists seized power. In the period of a year, more than 3000 political prisoners were imprisoned in the camp.

1936-1945: For nearly a decade, people who were not part of the ‘elite race’ were sent to this camp as part of Hitler’s creation of a ‘superior race’. Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, communists, social-democrats and former trade union leaders were sent to the ‘work hell’ where there were subjected to harsh conditions.

The camp was remodeled by prisoners from the Emsland camp. It was 1 of the first camps to be built and Hitler used Sachsenhausen as a model for all future camps. The shape of the compound was in a triangle, which was supposedly ideal for security purposes. The guards on the 3-corner watch towers would have been able to have a bird’s eye view of anyone trying to escape. Of course, this layout of the place meant that it was difficult to expand the camp. Although some extension was done in the following years, prisoners were mainly packed into the place. So what was meant to house 30K became home to 60K prisoners.

A model of the camp

Besides the watch towers, the Nazis had 3 other forms of security. The first being the death- strip. It was basically a path just before the prison wall. Signs indicate that anyone who goes beyond that line would be shoot immediately. After that would be the electric fence followed by the camp walls.

The death strip

Roll calls were held 2 times a day. All prisoners had to be accounted for, no matter how long it took. The longest roll call lasted 14hrs were a prisoner had ‘escaped’. He was recaptured at the end of the 14hrs. How did he escape? He found a wooden ladder lying around, and at night, crept out and placed the ladder over the electrified wall before climbing over.

I cant remember if the few standing barracks were the original ones or just replicas. Anyway, prisoners were kept within their own brandings. We went into the barracks where the Jews stayed in. In 1992, the 1st ever official from Israel made a political visit to Germany. During his stay, he went to the memorial camp site. This resulted in an Anti- Semitic firebomb attack which destroyed parts of this barrack museum. However, the people IC of this memorial site decided not to cover up the scorched marks as a reflection of the discriminatory feelings that a small group of people still have.

The original bunks
Toliets

The prisoners were made to do forced labor. Timbering, forgery, testing of products… Skilled prisoners were made to forge US and UK money in an attempt for the Nazis to destabilize the 2 countries.

In the picture below, shows a running track with sections made up of different types of rocks. Basalt, limestone… Prisoners were made to test running boots by running up and down the track daily. The thing was, they had to wear the shoes which were tossed out to them. Most often, these shoes did not ft. Try running 25miles on this uneven track with a 30kg pack on your back. Seems pretty okay for a fit NS guy? Try doing that with shoes which don’t fit and when ur on a diet of diluted gruel for 365 days a year.

Prison uniform

At a corner of the camp was the prison. A prison inside a prison. It was the place veiled in secrecy, torment and murder. It held those punished by the SS for infringements of camp discipline as well as prominent figures arrested by the Gestapo.

These are the poles were floggings were carried up within the prison. The prisoner would be bounded by his hands from his back, hooked onto the little rod protruding the pole. He would then be flipped over to the other side of the pole such that his back now faced the flogger. This meant that the prisoner’s arms would have been dislocated by then. Imagine the pain he had to go through with the rippling of arm mussels and the whip piercing into his skin.

The flogging poles

Behind the poles stood the foundations for the camp's prison isolation cells

Next, we went back to the main camp, to the site where gallows once stood. Hangings were taken with everyone in the camp present. If any of the prisoners were to look away during the cruel act, he would be subjected to the same fate as well.

The site of the gallows
The gallow beam

The thing that really affected me most was this little building which Jesse brought us into. We went into a dark basement. Under the dim lights, I tried to avoid stepping onto certain patches of floor which I had a feeling was something eerie. However, it was impossible to do so as the whole cement floor seemed splotched with the same thing.

When everyone had gathered in the area, our tour guide explained that we were in the morgue building. The basement was where they stored bodies and stacked them up like pancakes right up to the ceiling. My legs started turning into wobbly jelly upon hearing this. So what was on the floor was actually bloodstains. Imagine the amount of blood that had been split onto the place before the cement started to soak it in. Argh… my brand new Nike sneakers which were barely a month old! I’m never ever going to touch the soles of that pair of shoes again.

The way down to the basement
The steps at the side were for workers to drag the bodies down via the middle ramp

Going upstairs, we went into the room where autopsies were being performed on victims. This was a little weird. Hello?! Nazis killing people, why were they even bothered to find out how their prisoners died? It was all part of legal procedure. At least, if international bodies were to accuse them of murdering, the Nazis would be able to produce documents stating their innocence. Those prisoners would performed the autopsies were told by the Nazis that there were only 7 ways a prisoner could die. A heart attack- code for killed by gun fire. A stroke- code for death due to a serious blow on the head… etc. As such, recovered records indicated that lots of men in their 20s died of heart attacks and strokes.

The autopsy table

I still get the shivers whenever I remember the scene in the morgue building. It’s just so haunting and the smell of death is so strong there.

Next to the morgue were the infirmary barracks. Here, if a prisoner was lucky, he would get a kind doctor who was willing to treat and ensure that the prisoner recovered. This would mean sneaking medicinal supplies out of the Nazi’s medical center. However, most doctors would use the prisoners as guinea pigs for their own sick experiments. Some prisoners had pieces of flesh pulled back from their arms where an incision of rotting straw was placed. This was done to examine the rate of gangrene. Others were injected with different strains of Hepatitis viruses. There was this doctor I read on the hospital wall who performed his own operations on prisoners who had bladder problems. What he did was to ‘create’ another bladder for his patient… forgot how he did that. Maybe tying up the bladder into 2 sections

Next, we went to another barrack museum. There, we saw the gallows poles, hair clippings of prisoners and other instruments of torture and murder.

Station Z- The name for this part of camp says it all. That would be the last stop for prisoners. Shooting trenches, the crematorium, mass graves, ash dumping sites for the cremated bodies were done here. This place was really getting to me, somehow, I wasn’t in the mood to do anymore talking and when I was there, had no mood to do anything else. The whole place was just so plain sad, all the suffering and lives which were lost during those times *shakes head*

The shooting trench

Whats left of the crematorium

The group left the death site after 4 hrs. Cas wanted to stay behind a little while longer and further explore the place. However, after 40mins, we were just so depressed by the whole place that we decided to leave. This place was a real eye opener to me. Even though I never took history for my O levels, Sachsenhausen was like a real life, living text book. The place preserved the ghostly past of Hitler’s eradication of human misfits.- Groups of people deemed by the National Socialist ideology as racially and biologically inferior.

After this trip, I realized how blessed I am to be living in a period of peace. Well, it does seem like terrorism is The War of this millennium, but at least, I don’t have to go to bed each night worrying that I wont be able to survive the next day. I’m so grateful to God for placing me in this time period where I don’t have to hide my identity, my religious beliefs and my race. Okay, even though my friends & I do experience some form of racial discrimination here in UK from time to time, compared to what those WW2 victims suffered, we are really in a better situation. *Note to myself: The next time someone walks past me and makes a racial comment, Do Not get worked up. Think of what others have suffered in the past because of just being who they are*