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Due to Internet problems, column deadlines, and general exhaustion from an action packed sightseeing schedule, I’ve got very behind on my blogging. However, I shall now attempt to catch up, one day at a time.

On Tuesday the_webmeister and I headed to Orianenburg, a leafy suburb about the same distance from the center of Berlin as Greenwich is from Manhattan. At the end of a tree-lined street is Sachsenhausen concentration camp, one of the first concentration camps started by the Nazis in the 30’s.


It’s the utter normalcy of the street that completely freaked me out. Citizens of Orianenburg were tending their gardens on one side of the wall, while on the other underfed prisoners were being forced to run for 12 hours a day carrying heavy packs in order to test the soles of boots for the Germany army.



Sachensenhausen was originally used for political prisoners (namely anyone who disagreed with the Nazis, especially Communists) and “anti-social elements” (such as gypsies, homosexuals, transvestites, etc). Jews were also imprisoned there, although not after 1942 when Himmler decided to make Germany “Juden frei” and the Jews were shipped “to the East”.

Over 100,000 people died at Sachsenhausen. It was also a major training center for the SS; over 3,000 SS were billeted there for training. The average age of the soldiers in the Death’s Head unit of the Waffen SS was 20.7 years old. The head of the concentration camp inspectorate said that they purposely selected young men so that they could “indoctrinate them to readily sacrifice that little bit of themselves, so if necessary they could carry out their duty without scruples and with all necessary determination.”

Later in the war Russian POW’s were murdered at Sachsenhausen, which makes it seem doubly ironic that post-1945 the East German regime used the camp for political prisoners.

While we were there, I saw this guy wearing what I considered a particularly tasteless sweatshirt and a belt made of bullets.



Then I noticed the badge on his cap, with Hebrew lettering and “World Burns to Death.”




I googled it when I got back to the hotel, and it turns out World Burns to Death is a punk rock band whose “aesthetic preference is for derivative bland holocaust imagery: t-shirts, posters, and record covers stick to this formula. These images mirror the lyrical themes of the band, which detail crimes against humanity, religious hypocrisy and religion's effect on society, class oppression, nationalism, and man's general inhumanity to man.”

Guess that teaches me not to judge a guy by his sweatshirt. Still, I would have preferred if he’d left the “Gas Mask” sweatshirt at home.

Oh, and just in case you’re under any misapprehension that anti-Semitism in Europe isn’t still alive and well, the Jewish barracks at Sachsenhausen were firebombed back in the 90’s, a few days after a visit from the late Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. They rebuilt the barracks using the charred materials as a reminder:



Later that evening, we visited the site of a different form of totalitarianism. The night before we’d been to Potzdammer Platz to view a few remaining fragments of the Berlin Wall, which used to run right through the center.





In the 90’s, following the fall of the Wall, Potzdammer Platz was the biggest building site in Europe. We had an overpriced dinner at the Sony Center, with it’s cool, color changing roof , and then strolled down to the Brandenburg Gate.



Tuesday evening we followed up our Wall tour with a visit to Checkpoint Charlie



and the Haus Am Checkpoint Charlie , a museum started by Ranier Hildebrandt in 1962, right by the Berlin wall overlooking Checkpoint Charlie. The exhibition chronicles the attempts at escape to the West, both successful and tragically unsuccessful. There are cars with hiding compartments and hollowed out surfboards and example after example of the ingenuity people have when they want to be free.

It wasn’t just the exhibits that I found fascinating. My alter-ego, saramerica found this bathroom graffiti interesting as well.




Pretty sad that someone visiting a museum dedicated to freedom and tolerance would make a comment like, “We’ll stop the wall when you stop the illegal immigration.”

It was a thought provoking and emotional day, which we ended with a fantastic meal at a French restaurant right down the road from Checkpoint Charlie.