Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen

The Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum occupies the site of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, roughly 35 kilometers north of central Berlin, established by the SS in 1936 as a model camp and training center for concentration camp administration. Between 1936 and 1945 the SS imprisoned more than 200,000 people at Sachsenhausen, including political opponents, Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexual men, and Soviet prisoners of war, tens of thousands of whom died from forced labor, executions, medical experiments, and starvation. After 1945, Soviet occupation authorities used the same site as Special Camp No. 7, a postwar internment camp holding former Nazis and others, adding a second, less widely known layer of history to the grounds. The camp's triangular layout survives largely intact, including sections of the perimeter fence, guard towers, the roll-call area, and reconstructed and original barracks that now house permanent exhibitions on daily life, forced labor, and extermination. The former camp prison, known as Barrack 38 and the "Zellenbau" cell block, and the Station Z extermination site, where the SS conducted mass shootings and later built a gas chamber and crematorium, are preserved as some of the memorial's most somber stops. Exhibitions curated by the Brandenburg Memorials Foundation combine original artifacts, prisoner testimony, and site interpretation across both the Nazi and Soviet-era layers of the camp's history.