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Oranienburg was an early Nazi concentration camp, one of the first detention facilities established by the Nazis in the state of Prussia when they gained power in 1933.
Sachsenhausen (German pronunciation: [zaksn̩ˈhaʊzn̩]) or Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg was a German Nazi concentration camp in Oranienburg, Germany, used from 1936 until April 1945, shortly before the defeat of Nazi Germany in May later that year.
The Oranienburg concentration camp was established as one of the first concentration camps in Nazi Germany on March 21, 1933. Learn more
On 21 March 1933, the “Day of Potsdam”, on which Germany’s conservative elites bestowed their seal of approval on Hitler, the first state concentration camp in Prussia was set up by the local SA regiment, Standard 208, in a disused brewery towards the centre of the town of Oranienburg.
Sachsenhausen, one of the major Nazi German concentration camps, located at the edge of Oranienburg, 21 miles (34 km) northwest of Berlin. Sachsenhausen was established in 1936 as the northern German component of the system that would include Buchenwald (for central Germany) and Dachau (for southern Germany).
- The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica
Sachsenhausen concentration camp was built in the summer of 1936 as a model and training camp. Tens of thousands of the more than 200,000 prisoners interned here died as a result of hunger, disease, forced labour and mistreatment or were victims of systematic extermination operations by the SS.
From the late summer of 1938 internees of Sachsenhausen concentration camp were forced to build the world’s largest brickworks not far from the Lehnitz lock near Oranienburg, to supply building materials for the gigantomaniac structures planned by the Nazi leadership in the “Reich” capital city, Berlin.
