Understand
The construction of KZ-Sachsenhausen started in 1936 and it was officially taken into use in 1938. Originally built with the barracks arranged in a half-circle around the central tower, several expansions had to be hastily built to accommodate the swelling population. Many inmates were forced to do slave labor at the nearby Klinkerwerk brickworks, and there were also profitable side lines of money counterfeiting and ammunition manufacturing. While primarily a detention and work camp, with the SS policy being to perform mass executions out of view in the East, a group of 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war were killed in Sachsenhausen in 1941, followed by the construction of a small gas chamber and crematorium to facilitate killing small groups. Overall, over 200,000 people were imprisoned in KZ-Sachsenhausen and tens of thousands were killed there, mostly through hunger, disease and torture.
The inmates of KZ-Sachsenhausen were a varied group. While a number of Jews were interned, mostly before 1942, the bulk of the population was political prisoners of various kinds, especially actual or suspected Communists and Social Democrats. Other groups included common criminals, "asocials" artists, playwrights, homeless, etc, Jehova's Witnesses, foreign nationals, homosexuals and Roma Gypsies.
As the Red Army approached in 1945, the prisoners were marched off towards the North Sea in a death march that claimed over 6000 lives. After the camp's capture and inclusion in the DDR, the Soviets documented the facilities and conducted a large trial in Berlin of the responsible Nazis. They then turned the KZ into a prison camp of their own, "Special Camp No. 7", imprisoning former Nazi functionaries as well as political prisoners. Until the camp was closed in 1950, some 60,000 people were imprisoned there, of which about 12,000 died.
In 1951 the GDR police blew up the building with the gas chamber and crematorium. The area was then neglected. In the 1960s the camp was refitted by the Communists and opened as a museum commemorating Anti-Fascistic Struggle, entirely neglecting all non-Communist victims. Israel protested so loudly that a Jewish Museum was soon opened on the grounds. After the Berlin Wall fell, the Soviet-era camp was rediscovered, documented and added to the exhibits. Israel's prime minister Yitzhak Rabin visited in 1992; several weeks afterward the Jewish barracks were hit in an arson attack by neo-Nazis. A new building devoted to the Soviet camp, as well as a new roof over the remains of the crematorium complex were constructed.
