By Ben Votroubek (’18)
Our trip to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp was a sobering one. It was full of painful and graphic imagery. One section of the camp really stood out to me, that being the Soviet Liberation Memorial on the far north side of the camp. To me this memorial stands as a reminder that the horrors that existed within Nazi concentration camps did not halt once the war was over. Instead these camps were often repurposed by Soviet forces in the east to house former Nazi’s and other political oponents. While the treatment of these prisoners did not employ nearly the same amount of psychological terror that their Nazi counterparts did, the death toll was quite similar. The memorial tries to give the impression that the brave Soviets liberated their fellow comrades, while ignoring the plight of the much larger Jewish population that resided in the camp during the war and turning a blind eye to the events that took place in that very location thereafter.
The existence of this monument allows the space to give us a very broad and unified picture of its history. We can see the concentration camp for what it is and what it represents, a short horrific period of war and a genocide that will haunt Germany for years to come. We also get to look into turmoil that surrounded Germany following the war, evolving around the Soviet and Communist influences in East Berlin. Finally, we can see how the town of Oranienburg has formed into a quiet suburb and the site has turned into a tourist attraction less than 30 years after the fall of the Berlin Wall. Therefore causing Sachsenhausen and the Soviet Liberation Memorial to fit right into the fabric of Berlin and Germany as it exists today.