May 8th

The day started off with a visit to the Sachsenhausen concentration camp. I think for a lot of us this was very eye opening, what we had learned in the classroom was nothing compared to how much we learned by walking the camp.





This was not a death camp, only a work camp, but still there were so many people who had been executed there. We saw the different ways people were murdered. Our guide told us how the Germans dealt with the psychological issues they had from killing human after human. At first the German executors would be in plain sight of the victim and would hear him/her beg for mercy, this took its toll on the Germans. First they were given alcohol to fix the problems but later on they made it so the executor would not have to see his victim, just have to pull the trigger.



We went on to see one of the barracks that the men stayed in (this was a mens camp). The building was meant to hold around 100-150 people but the average was around 400. This really brought it into perspective and made us realize how intense everything was.




After the camp we went on our city tour of Berlin. The one thing about Germany that made it different was that everything was new, because of the war much of the structures were destroyed. Also the structures were not that eye please due to the socialist way of construction, cheap is better, but the Germans managed to make some of the buildings look better by adding some colour and brightening them up. That was pretty well all of may 8th