Today I went with a walking tour to visit Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp. It was very interesting to see in real life something many North Americans only ever read and hear about in school. It is a very touchy subject, but if you ever have the chance it is something worth going to see, to visit and to gain a deeper understanding about the horrors that occurred in those places. The contrast between the lush and beautiful countryside and the scarred land on which the horrors of genocide took place.
Here is the camp gate.
Once inside if you look immediately to your left you see the electric fence line, otherwise referred to as the grey area. The sign states “shots will be fired without warning.
We were able to walk through two of the few barracks that still remain standing.
Straight inside the door we saw the toilets, washrooms, and the store room. Many people were trampled to death in the rush of people headed to the toilets because they were only permitted shorts breaks once or twice during the day. The SS was also known to drowned men in the foot washing stations. The store room was sometimes used to isolate one prisoner from the rest or to sandwich people into the small space until they died of suffocation.
The day room of tables and lockers used to take up one wing of the barrack.
While beds took up the other wing. In the beginning there we normal metal bunk beds in the barracks. They were soon replaced by narrower three tiered wooden bunks, that at the height of the holocaust slept two or three per tier.
Next we visited the Zellenbau, the special prisoners solitary confinement area. This was used for prisoners that they found to be a threat because they could lift moral or if they were kept alive because they could prove useful to the Nazi party.
Then we walked through the old cook house, where we saw the cold room and the potato peeling room.
In the potato peeling room the prisoners had made cartoons and paintings on the walls. 
On the was to Station Z we passed a memorial for all the soviets killed at the camp.
At Station Z we passed by the extermination trenches.
Then at the end we looked at the remains of the extermination chambers and the crematorium, which was later used as the gas chambers. The building was built for a purpose not to last, which explains why it has collapsed in on itself. In order to preserve it as much as possible they have built a roof to hang over it and built a minimal frame around it.
