On 21 March 1933 the local SA regiment set up the first concentration camp in Prussia in a vacant factory building in the centre of Oranienburg. In the months following the assumption of power by the National Socialists, Oranienburg took on a key role in the persecution of the opposition, especially in the “Reich” capital, Berlin.
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Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in the summer of 1936 as a model and training camp. Tens of thousands of the more than 200,000 prisoners interned here died as a result of hunger, disease, forced labour and mistreatment or were victims of systematic extermination operations by the SS.
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In August 1945, a good three months after the end of the war and the liberation of Europe from National Socialist domination, the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, moved its Special Camp No. 7 to the centre of the former Sachsenhausen concentration camp. Of the 60,000 prisoners interned there, 12,000 died of hunger and disease.
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After the site had been used for many years by the Soviet army, the Barracked People’s Police (KVP) and the National People’s Army (NVA) of the German Democratic Republic, planning began in 1956 for the Sachsenhausen National Memorial, which was inaugurated on 23 April 1961.
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In the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum there are thirteen smaller permanent exhibitions illuminating various aspects of the history of the place. The Memorial is a place of mourning and commemoration while at the same time fulfilling its mission as a modern museum of contemporary history.
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