Journal Reflection 3: Sachsenhausen

On Thursday we traveled for over an hour by local train to get to Sachsenhausen, which was a concentration camp from approximately 1938 to 1945. It was an experience I will never forget (and not just because of the crazy rainstorm we were caught up in). I had learned, I thought, a lot about WWII during my time in school, but actually visiting the former site of one of the camps really opened my eyes a little bit to the realities of concentration camps and the horrors of that war.

What matched my expectations

When we arrived at Sachsenhausen there was a lot about it that surprised me. First of all, this camp was very close to a residential area; the neighborhood has existed since before the war, and stayed after it. Most of my mental images of concentration camps have been those of a compound surrounded by barbed wire in the middle of nowhere, but that was not the case at all. The ground of the former camp ended just a few hundred feet from where the neighborhood streets began. I was really surprised by this, but when our tour guide explained the context of the camp, it made sense. We learned that the predecessor to Sachsenhausen – the Oranienburg camp - was used to house political prisoners as a scare tactic to others, to crush the political opposition. In addition, Sachsenhausen was a place where political allies and guests were invited to view the camp that was billed as a center for “political reeducation”, so the Nazis wouldn’t want it to look like a prison. There are other elements of the camp that connect to this; the triangle design of the camp that is less functionality and more aesthetic, the former fountain and swan pond, the places where flowers would have been planted near the offices of SS officers.

This was one of the most horrifying parts of the camp, to me, because these beautiful things were so close to the horrifying mistreatment and torture occurring just on the other side of a gate that reads “Work Brings Freedom”, which we all know is the opposite of the truth. For some reason, the thought and care that was taken to create propaganda for the Nazi party at every turn was something I didn’t really consider when I was initially learning about WWII. My focus was always on how the war was industrialized, how the Nazi regime took the elements of human efficiency and advancement and used those techniques to exploit, torture and murder other humans. Due to hindsight, I think, we never think about accepted the Nazi why people accepted the Nai regime, or went along with it, or why people were content to sit back, or just assumed the persecution of political prisoners, Jews, Roma and all those considered “less than human” was not as bad as it actually was. I always heard this very simple narrative of “the Nazis were evil, and everyone who let WWII happen was stupid”. But now, with this added layer of propaganda and trickery, even at concentration camps where people were being worked to death, tortured and murdered, I think the story is much more complex. It’s likely that people who would have otherwise gotten involved didn’t think that their intervention was necessary. Or, some people may have used this as a cop-out, going along with the flimsy narrative of reeducation to avoid persecution themselves.

The visit to Sachsenhausen also gets me thinking about the German identity, and of the collective guilt that is connected to the war (if you assume that there is a collective guilt, instead of responsibility). Both of the lecturers at Humboldt and the information at the places we visited emphasized that every German was connected to the war in some way; they themselves fought in the war or they had family in the war, or they opposed the war and were persecuted. In addition, there is the feeling of the collective guilt that the people of Germany allowed the Nazi regime to take over, to create the Holocaust, and the guilt that many participated in the Holocaust. I wonder if this layer of propaganda and advertisement to mask the true horrors of concentration camps adds to that guilt or lessens it. Should the German guilt then be lessened, because there was a distortion of what was occurring in these camps? Or should this add more weight to the guilt, because the people were too complicit with a flimsy story of reeducation? How do the German people wrestle with this layer of the Holocaust? I think this is a topic worth investigating, and I want to learn more about the nuances and complexities of the people involved in the Second World War from Germany. For this reason, this week I will definitely be visiting the Topography of Terror.