Meet your guide at a centrally located meeting point in Berlin and board the train to the Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum in Oranienburg. More than 200,000 people were imprisoned here between 1936 and 1945. At first, the prisoners were primarily political opponents of the Nazi regime. However, people that were defined by the National Socialists as racially or biologically inferior were later included. By 1939, there were a large number of citizens from the occupied European states imprisoned here. Tens of thousands of people died of starvation, disease, forced labor, and mistreatment, or they were victims of the systematic extermination by the Schutzstaffel, otherwise known as the SS. Thousands of other prisoners died during the “death marches” that followed the evacuation of the camp in April of 1945. At that time, approximately 3,000 sick prisoners, along with the doctors and nurses who had stayed behind in the camp, were freed by Soviet and Polish soldiers. Not for the faint of heart, this tour features a visit to the punishment cells, gallows, gas chambers and burial pits located inside the prison. Hear stories of prisoner bravery as well as the chilling atrocities that took place at the camp — which now serves as a national memorial to the prisoners who lived and died here. The tour ends with a return train trip to Berlin.