Berlin & Sachsenhausen (Oranienburg)

After Oktoberfest in Munich, my friends and I hopped on an airplane and flew to Berlin, which we stayed at very briefly (less than 24h). We saw the main sites, but we were really hurried and tired. Really bad planning on our part. We were trying to fit too much into too little time.

We saw this huge crowd gathering in-front of this really fancy hotel right near the Brandenburg Gate. Thankfully it wasn't Paris Hilton or some other obnoxious celebrity. Apparently, it was the queen of Denmark or something of that nature.


Lacey and Adam looking pretty tired in front of the Brandenburg gate. I'm sure that was the result of the Oktoberfest festivities the night before.

It was a beautiful day in Berlin. Here's the Reichstag.

A panoramic of Berlin.

The next day, we rented a car and ended up with a Mercedes! Okay, it's not a Mercedes S500, but still, it's a Mercedes.

We decided to visit a concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, called Sachsenhausen. The former concentration camp was turned into a museum. It wasn't a death camp like Auschwitz, but a significant amount of people did die here. After the war, the Soviets turned this place into a prison. And sometime after, it was finally turned into a museum. The timeline of this is pretty fuzzy to me right now... I'll have to look it up again.

The entrance gate reads "work makes you free".

The main guard tower. Originally designed such that the entire camp grounds could be seen from this building.

Inside one of the prisons...

These are remnants of the prison cells.

The facilities.

You can see how huge this place is. Despite it's huge size, it became overpopulated during WWII.

A monument the Soviets built after WWII.

You can see the main guard tower in the distance.

Here, people were placed in this pit, and executed with a gun. The executions were performed in this pit to decrease the noise from the gunshot. I suppose it'd be absolute chaos if all the prisoners knew that they would eventually be executed.

This is a secondary prison camp that was built as an addon to the main complex.

A panoramic from one of the corners of concentration camp. The camp was built in a triangular shape so that everything could be seen from the main guard tower. The main guard tower is located behind that giant obelisk structure.