This morning we took the coach out of Berlin to Orianenburg to visit Sachsenhausen concentration camp, preserved as a memorial to those the Nazis persecuted. Sachsenhausen was set up as a model camp and housed political opponents of the Nazis sent there for punishment and later some prisoners of war and some Jews. The camp was organised in a triangular shape with watchtowers along each side. Within this, some huts have been kept to show aspects of the regime: the punishments, medical experiments and the tough daily existence.
Besides the preserved physical remains there are numerous artifacts to demonstrate the violence and death meted out by the SS on the inmates, and records of some of those inmates, showing their varied live before they ended up in this place. Walking round in the snow is a miserable experience, but its large numbers of visitors have a need to understand how a tyrannical regime can justify crimes against human beings in what they saw as a greater cause.
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