Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg)

The SS established the Sachsenhausen concentration camp as the principal concentration camp for
the Berlin area. Located near Oranienburg, north of Berlin, the Sachsenhausen camp opened on July
12, 1936, when the SS transferred 50 prisoners from the Esterwegen concentration camp to begin
construction of the camp.
PRISONERS IN THE CAMP
In the early stage of the camp's existence the SS and police incarcerated mainly political opponents
and real or perceived criminal offenders in Sachsenhausen. By the end of 1936, the camp held 1,600
prisoners. Between 1936 and 1945, however, Sachsenhausen also held Jews,homosexuals, Jehovah's
Witnesses, "asocials" (among these prisoners wereRoma and Sinti), and, later, Soviet civilians.
Prominent figures interned in Sachsenhausen included Pastor MartinNiemller, former Austrian
chancellor Kurt von Schuschnigg, Georg Elser, Herschel Grynszpan, and Joseph Stalin's son, Iakov
Dzhugashvili.
The number of Jewish prisoners in Sachsenhausen varied over the course of the camp's existence, but
ranged from 21 at the beginning of 1937 to 11,100 at the beginning of 1945. During the
nationwideKristallnacht ("Night of Broken Glass") pogrom of November 1938,Reichsfhrer SS (SS
chief) and Chief of German Police Heinrich Himmler ordered the arrest of up to 30,000 Jews.
The SStransported those arrested to Sachsenhausen, Dachau, andBuchenwald concentration camps.
Almost 6,000 Jews arrived in Sachsenhausen in the days following the Kristallnacht riots.
In the following months, the number of Jews at Sachsenhausen steadily decreased, as SS authorities
released Jewish prisoners, often in exchange for a stated intent to emigrate. By the end of 1938,
Sachsenhausen held 1,345 Jews.
There was another marked increase in the number of Jewish prisoners when, in mid-September 1939,
shortly after World War IIbegan, German authorities arrested Jews holding Polish citizenship and
stateless Jews, most of whom were living in the greater Berlin area, and incarcerated them in
Sachsenhausen. Thereafter, the number of Jewish prisoners decreased again, as SS authorities
deported them from Sachsenhausen to other concentration camps in occupied Poland, most
often Auschwitz, in an effort to make the so-called German Reich "free of Jews" (judenfrei).
By autumn of 1942 there were few Jewish prisoners still in Sachsenhausen, and their numbers
remained low until 1944. In the spring of 1944, SS authorities began to bring thousands of Hungarian
and Polish Jews from ghettos and other concentration camps to Sachsenhausen as the need for forced

laborers in Sachsenhausen and its subcamps increased. Many of these new Jewish prisoners were
women. By the beginning of 1945 the number of Jewish prisoners had risen to 11,100.
Following anti-German demonstrations in Prague in November 1939, German authorities
incarcerated some 1,200 Czech university students in Sachsenhausen. In total, German authorities
deported over 6,000 people from the annexed Czech provinces to Sachsenhausen.
German forces in Poland shot or deported to concentration camps thousands of Poles, especially
teachers, priests, government officials, and other national and community leaders, in an attempt to
eliminate the Polish educated elite and thereby prevent organized resistance to German rule in
Poland. The German authorities sent some of these Poles to Sachsenhausen. On May 3, 1940, for
example, 1,200 Polish prisoners arrived in Sachsenhausen from the Pawiak prison in Warsaw. The
prisoners included many juveniles, Catholic priests, army officers, professors, teachers, doctors, and
minor government officials.
The first group of Soviet prisoners of war arrived in Sachsenhausen at the end of August 1941. By the
end of October 1941, the SS had deported about 12,000 Soviet prisoners of war to Sachsenhausen.
Camp authorities shot thousands of the Soviet POWs shortly after they arrived in the camp.
Estimates of Soviet POWs killed at Sachsenhausen range from 11,000-18,000.
In retaliation for the August 1944 Polish Home Army uprising in Warsaw, the German authorities
expelled most of the Polish population from the city. The Germans deported 60,000-80,000 Polish
civilians to concentration camps. By early October 1944, the Germans had deported about 6,000 Poles
to Sachsenhausen.
SS PERSONNEL
In November 1936, the camp headquarter's staff of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp consisted
of 70 SS personnel; by 1944 this number had reached 277. SS guard personnel at Sachsenhausen
numbered around 1,400 in 1941, and by January 1945, this number had risen to 3,356. In mid-1936,
SS Lieutenant Colonel Michael Johann Lippert oversaw the construction of the camp. SS Major Karl
Otto Koch replaced Lippert as camp commandant in October, and held the post until the summer of
1937.
During the years 1938-1939 Sachsenhausen experienced frequent changes in camp leadership. At the
beginning of 1940, SS-Oberfhrer[an SS rank between colonel and brigadier general, for which there
is no English equivalent] Hans Loritz took over as camp commandant. SS Lieutenant Colonel Anton
Kaindl replaced Loritz in 1942 and held the position of camp commandant until 1945. The guards of

Sachsenhausen in the early years of the camp were men from the SS Death's Head units (SSTotenkopfverbnde); later, members of the Waffen-SS were transferred to the SS Death's Head Battalion
and deployed as guards.
Buchenwald
Together with its many satellite camps, Buchenwald was one of the largest concentration
camps established within the old German borders of 1937.
INTRODUCTION
The camp was constructed in 1937 in a wooded area on the northern slopes of the Ettersberg, about
five miles northwest of Weimar in east-central Germany. Before the Nazi takeover of power, Weimar
was known as the home of leading literary figure Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, a product of
German liberal tradition in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It was also known as the
birthplace of German constitutional democracy in 1919, the Weimar Republic. During the Nazi
regime, "Weimar" became associated with the Buchenwald concentration camp.
SS authorities opened Buchenwald for male prisoners in July 1937. Women were not part of the
Buchenwald camp system until late 1943 or early 1944. Prisoners were confined in the northern part
of the camp in an area known as the main camp, while SS guard barracks and the camp
administration compound were located in the southern part. An electrified barbed-wire fence,
watchtowers, and a chain of sentries outfitted with automatic machine guns, surrounded the main
camp. The detention area, also known as the Bunker, was located at the entrance to the main camp.
The SS often shot prisoners in the stables and hanged other prisoners in the crematorium area.
BUCHENWALD PRISONER POPULATION
Most of the early inmates at Buchenwald were political prisoners. However, in 1938, in the aftermath
of Kristallnacht, German SS and police sent almost 10,000 Jews to Buchenwald where the camp
authorities subjected them to extraordinarily cruel treatment upon arrival. 255 of them died as a
result of their initial mistreatment at the camp.
Jews and political prisoners were not the only groups within the Buchenwald prisoner population,
although the politicals, given their long-term presence at the site, played an important role in the
camp's prisoner infrastructure. The SS also interned recidivist criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Roma
and Sinti (Gypsies), and German military deserters at Buchenwald. Buchenwald was one of the only

concentration camps that held so-called work-shy individuals, persons whom the regime
incarcerated as asocials because they could not, or would not, find gainful employment. In the
camp's later stages, the SS also incarcerated prisoners-of-war of various nations (including the
United States), resistance fighters, prominent former government officials of German-occupied
countries, and foreign forced laborers.
in 1944, camp officials established a "special compound" for prominent German political prisoners
near the camp administration building in Buchenwald. In August 1944, the SS staff murdered Ernst
Thlmann, chairman of the Communist Party of Germany before Hitler's rise to power in 1933, in
Buchenwald after holding him there for several years.
MEDICAL EXPERIMENTS AT BUCHENWALD
Beginning in 1941, a number of physicians and scientists carried out a varied program of medical
experimentation on prisoners at Buchenwald in special barracks in the northern part of the main
camp. Medical experiments aimed at testing the efficacy of vaccines and treatments against
contagious diseases such as typhus, typhoid, cholera, and diphtheria resulted in hundreds of deaths.
In 1944, Danish physician Dr. Carl Vaernet began a series of experiments that he claimed would
"cure" homosexual inmates through hormonal transplants.
BUCHENWALD: FORCED LABOR AND SUBCAMPS
During World War II, the Buchenwald camp system became an important source of forced labor. The
prisoner population expanded rapidly, reaching 112,000 by February 1945. The camp authorities
deployed Buchenwald prisoners in the German Equipment Works (Deutsche-Ausrstungs-Werke;
DAW), an enterprise owned and operated by the SS; in camp workshops; and in the camp's stone
quarry. In February 1942, the Gustloff firm established a subcamp of Buchenwald to support its
armaments works, and in March 1943 opened a large munitions plant adjacent to the camp. A rail
siding completed in 1943 connected the camp with the freight yards in Weimar, facilitating the
shipment of war supplies.
Buchenwald administered at least 88 subcamps located across Germany, from Dsseldorf in the
Rhineland to the border with the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia in the east. SS authorities and
firm executives (both state-owned and private) deployed prisoners in the satellite camps, mostly in
armaments factories, in stone quarries, and on construction projects. Periodically, the SS staff
conducted selections throughout the Buchenwald camp system and dispatched those too weak or

disabled to work to so-calledeuthanasia facilities such as Bernburg, where euthanasia operatives

gasse them as part of Operation 14f13, the extension of euthanasia killing operations to ill and
exhausted concentration camp prisoners. SS physicians or orderlies killed, by phenol injection, other
prisoners unable to work.
THE LIBERATION OF BUCHENWALD
As Soviet forces swept through Poland, the Germans evacuated thousands of concentration camp
prisoners from German-occupied areas under threat. After long, brutal marches, more than 10,000
weak and exhausted prisoners from Auschwitz and Gross-Rosen, most of them Jews, arrived in
Buchenwald in January 1945.
In early April 1945, as US forces approached the camp, the Germans began to evacuate some 28,000
prisoners from the main camp and an additional several thousand prisoners from the subcamps of
Buchenwald. About a third of these prisoners died from exhaustion en route or shortly after arrival,
or were shot by the SS. The underground resistance organization in Buchenwald, whose members
held key administrative posts in the camp, saved many lives. They obstructed Nazi orders and
delayed the evacuation.
On April 11, 1945, in expectation of liberation, starved and emaciated prisoners stormed the
watchtowers, seizing control of the camp. Later that afternoon, US forces entered Buchenwald.
Soldiers from the 6th Armored Division, part of the Third Army, found more than 21,000 people in
the camp. Between July 1937 and April 1945, the SS imprisoned some 250,000 persons from all
countries of Europe in Buchenwald. Exact mortality figures for the Buchenwald site can only be
estimated, as camp authorities never registered a significant number of the prisoners. The SS
murdered at least 56,000 male prisoners in the Buchenwald camp system, some 11,000 of them Jews.

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