Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum

Why go

The town of Oranienburg's page on the memorial (in German, translated here) says the SS built the Sachsenhausen concentration camp on the edge of Oranienburg from 1936; by 1945, 200,000 people from all over Europe had been imprisoned there, and tens of thousands died in custody or were victims of systematic extermination. It says the Soviet special camp No. 7/No. 1 occupied the core area of the former camp from 1945 to 1950, where 60,000 people were again imprisoned and at least 12,000 did not survive. In 1993 the memorial and museum became part of the newly founded Brandenburg Memorials Foundation (Stiftung Brandenburgische Gedenkstätten). The same page says the memorial will remain a place of mourning and remembrance, and that its permanent exhibitions, at the authentic sites, cover the history of the concentration camp, the Soviet special camp and the GDR-era memorial. This record is the memorial and museum, not the historical camp; it lies in Oranienburg, outside Berlin.