10. Berlin: Sachsenhausen Small Group Bus Tour
After meeting at the Berlin Zoologsicher Garten station, you will board a hired coach to reach Oranienburg. Along the way, your guide will introduce Sachsenhausen, showing you where the inmates would have worked in Oranienburg. You will also learn more about what the local populations knew about the realities of this immense camp system.
Sachsenhausen was the first concentration camp that was built from the ground up to be a camp, planned and designed for maximum control. You can enter the old barracks and learn about daily life for the inmates of the camp, as well as how hard labor, starvation, disease, torture and death were a part of daily life. You will also see the harrowing areas where people were gassed, shot by firing squad, or hanged.
With your guide, you'll walk around the interior of Heinrich Himmmler's new, modern, and always expandable concentration camp. You can visit the commandants house, before walking through Tower A, where the iconic words "Arbeit Macht Frei" can still be seen on the gate today.
The East Germans memorialized Sachsenhausen in 1961, and today you can experience the location where atrocities were committed, as well as discover how the Germans deal with their history and how they come to terms with their past today. Once the tour has concluded, you will be picked up and brought back to Berlin in an air-conditioned bus to the meeting point at Zoologischer Garten station. Once your tour has concluded, your guide will be happy to answer any and all questions you may have about your stay in Berlin.