The Sachsenhausen camp was located in the immediate vicinity of the Inspectorate of Concentration Camps, on the outskirts of Oranienburg. It was built by teams of prisoners transferred to the site from small camps in the Ems area and elsewhere, beginning in July 1936. As indicated in a letter written by Heinrich Himmler to the minister of justice, Sachsenhausen, like Buchenwald, was built with a view to its use in wartime, for an expected intake of large numbers of prisoners. In November 1938, following the Kristallnacht pogrom, 1,800 Jews were sent to Sachsenhausen; some 450 of them were murdered shortly after their arrival in the camp. The total number of persons imprisoned in Sachsenhausen was approximately 200,000. When World War II began, conditions in the camp deteriorated sharply: in 1939, more than 800 prisoners died there, and in 1940 this number increased to nearly 4,000. In 1940, 26,000 prisoners, mainly from Poland, were delivered to the camp; most of them stayed only a short while and were then transferred to other camps in the Reich. At some point, probably in August 1941, the SS set up an installation for mass executions by shooting, disguising it as a prisoners' examination room. In the following months, 13,000 to 18,000 Soviet prisoners of war, who were not even registered in the camp's lists, were murdered there. The camp also had a gas chamber, probably installed in 1943; it was added to an existing crematorium compound. The gas chamber was used on special orders only; one such occasion, presumably, was in February 1945, when the SS had several thousand physically debilitated prisoners killed on the eve of the camp's evacuation. In addition to the Soviet prisoners of war executed on arrival and those prisoners who died en route to and from the camp and during its evacuation, some 30,000 persons perished in Sachsenhausen. In the first few years, the most important work project was a brickyard that prisoners built in the spring of 1938, on the Oder-Havel canal. Some two thousand prisoners were put to work on the project on a daily basis. In April 1941 a satellite camp was established for the brickyard work team; conditions in it were exceptionally harsh, and prisoners whose assignment to it was lengthy had little chance of surviving. From 1943 on, the prisoners were employed primarily in various branches of the armaments industry, especially in the production of engines for aircraft, tanks, and vehicles. In 1944, seven thousand prisoners were assigned to the Heinkel Works in Oranienburg. Another large contingent was employed at the DEMAG tank plant in Falkensee, near Berlin. Special satellite camps were put up for both these plants. The brickyard was converted to the manufacture of grenades. Sachsenhausen was liberated on April 27, 1945, by advance troops of the Soviet army. At that point the camp contained only three thousand prisoners, most of whom were not fit for marching. All the other prisoners had been evacuated by the SS.
