Today we had a guided tour around the concentration camp of Sachsenhausen outside of Berlin. Starting out, we walked down the path that all prisoners would have had to travel down. It was really fascinating to think of all the people in the city that would have witnessed the prisoners being forced to work for their lives. Most people in Germany were led to believe that these prisoners deserved to be put away for the sake of the country, but it is hard to imagine that nobody could see through this false facade.

Our tour guide, Joe, was really insightful on all things about Sachsenhausen and many concentration camps in general. The camp served as a forced labor camp rather than an extermination or death camp like Auschwitz. This made the overall experience different than I expected. Rather than gruesome pictures of medical experiments and astronomical figures of casualties, the camp was much tamer than many stereotypes about concentration camps would assume.

However, this does not take away from the contemplative nature the site has to offer nor the devastation that was brought to many of the victims. We got to walk through a reconstructed bunker that housed hundreds of prisoners; these included political prisoners, social hazard ones, homosexuals, prisoners of war, and Jews. Conditions were horrible, and the lifestyle unimaginable.

It is hard to imagine that such terrible atrocities took place in the last century when the world was supposed to be more modernized and humane. Therefore, it is important to see these kind of sites first hand to try to understand everything that happened so nothing similar happens again. Our tour guide closed with a really powerful quote from Edmund Burke that I will repeat here. “All that’s necessary for the forces of evil to win in the world is for enough good men to do nothing.”