Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp

The collection contains among others:

List of names of deceased prisoners, individual death announcements, lists relating to order in the camp, correspondence relating to debarment certification ("Ausschließungsschein") and notification of the Wehrmacht surveillance of prisoners ("Wehrüberwachungsbenachrichtigung"), prisoner register, documents relating to sterilizations, protocol of the local court (Amtsgericht) Oranienburg and interrogation transcripts of the political branch of CC Sachsenhausen concerning unnatural deaths, secondary death books of the civil record registry office Oranienburg, notebook of a prisoner from the records office, camp correspondence, certificates of release, prisoner registration forms and files, register of personal effects, status reports, transport lists, a Block book, documents relating to the prisoner hospital, laboratory tests, numbers books, prisoners cards cemetery lists, Red Cross correspondence, various reports and correspondence from the post-war period, manuscripts of former prisoners, witness testimonies

History of Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen 1936-1945:

Concentration Camp Sachsenhausen, established as of 1936 in Oranienburg, had, as a “model” und training camp in the immediate vicinity of the Reich capitol, a special role in the concentration camp system as. As of 1938, the administrative headquarters of the SS for all the concentration camps was located in Oranienburg. Until 1939 the prisoners were primarily Germans, who were put to work by the SS on extending the camp. Furthermore, as early as 1938, the SS had an enormous brick works be constructed near the camp, and where, under particularly brutal conditions, prisoners had to manufacture the bricks for the gargantuan structures Hitler was planning to have built in Berlin. After the first satellite camp of CC Sachsenhausen was built in 1941 next to brick works, satellite camps were built next to all the larger industrial companies in Berlin and Brandenburg as of 1942. Here the prisoners were forced to work primarily in constructing tanks and air armaments. A total of more than 200,000 people were imprisoned in CC Sachsenhausen; of these, tens of thousands fell victim to the ever-worsening living- and work conditions, abuse or systematic acts of extermination of the SS since the start of the war. By 1940 non-German prisoners formed the majority of the prisoners, in 1944 it was 90 percent. They came from all the occupied countries in Europe. By the end of January 1945 the KZ was hopelessly overcrowded, due to the thousands of prisoners arriving from the camps east of the Oder river. At this time more than 56,500 prisoners were there. Shortly thereafter many of them were sent on by the SS to CC Bergen-Belsen and Theresienstadt. On 21 April 1945 the SS began with the evacuation of CC Sachsenhausen and its satellite camps. In several convoys, over 33,000 prisoners were forced onto a dearch march heading towards the Baltic Sea. According to the testimony of the final Camp Commandant of CC Sachsenhausen, Anton Kaindl, in Lübeck Bay the prisoners were to be loaded onto ships which would then be sunk to the bottom of the Baltic Sea. Some 3,000 prisoners left behind in the camp were liberated by the Red Army on 22 April 1945.

Source: Meyer, Winfried: Sachsenhausen (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, ed. by Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, pp. 204-206 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/15/Gedenkst%C3%A4tte-und-Museum-Sachsenhausen [Latest access: 2012-08-08].