Most people, when asked about Nazi camps, would point East – to the extermination camps that gained notoriety through the Holocaust: to Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek etc.
The truth is, however, that these camps came relatively late in the history of the Third Reich. Their predecessors – the concentration camps – such as Sachsenhausen, were constructed within Nazi Germany in the 1930s.
Devised as a so-called ‘protective custody camp’ to house political prisoners, Sachsenhausen grew to become not only the nucleus of the entire Nazi concentration camp industry; but also a proving ground for the methods and practices that would lead to the ultimate horror of industrial mass murder and genocide.