Going through school we have studied WW2 many times. Going through an actual camp brought everything we had been taught life.
“Albeit Macht Frei”, The words on the front gate of the camp means work sets you free. These words were put onto many of the concentration camps and sets a dark feel to the place as you walk in. Sachsenhousen was mainly a work camp, but some 1000 people died there of the roughly 200000 prisoners who passed through. These numbers are overwhelming. Walking through the camp there is a sense of death everywhere from the bunks to the morgue the atrocities that happened in the place are hard to even hear about.
The camp was different than what I was expecting when I came. Part of that was due to the camp also being used by the Soviets right after it was capture. There are both memorials to its time under Nazi control and Soviet control. Just seeing everything in person instead of in text books was a somber event. Being in a place where 200000 people were kept in terrible conditions and reading about what they had to go through is a difficult thing to process and I am glad that there are still remnants of these camps to remind people what happened so that hopefully it will never happen again.