Gedenkstätte und Museum Sachsenhausen - Sachsenhausen Memorial

From 1936, the SS built on the outskirts of Oranienburg Sachsenhausen concentration camp. As a model and training camp in the immediate vicinity of the Reich capital, Sachsenhausen occupied a special position in the system of concentration camps. From 1938, the administrative headquarters of the SS was in Oranienburg for all concentration camps. By 1945, 200,000 people from all over Europe were imprisoned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, tens of thousands of them were victims of hunger, illness, forced labor and ill-treatment or were victims of systematic SS extermination. On the death marches at the end of April 1945, more than a thousand prisoners died. About 3,000 prisoners who remained in the camp were detained on 22/23 March. April freed from Soviet and Polish soldiers.

From 1945-1950, Soviet special camp No. 7 / No. 1 was located in the core area of ​​the former concentration camp. In the barracks, 60,000 people were imprisoned again by the Soviet secret service, 12,000 of them died of starvation and disease.

In 1961 the "Sachsenhausen National Remembrance and Memorial Center" was opened as the third concentration camp memorial site in the GDR. Since 1993, the memorial and the museum Sachsenhausen is part of the newly founded Foundation Brandenburg Memorials. After a comprehensive refurbishment and redesign, twelve permanent exhibitions in the authentic locations inform about different aspects of the history of Sachsenhausen. The Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum remain a place of mourning and remembrance, and at the same time face the tasks of a modern museum of contemporary history.