Prominent prisoners included Joseph Stalin's oldest son, Yakov Dzhugashvili; assassin Herschel Grynszpan; Paul Reynaud, the penultimate prime minister of the French Third Republic; Francisco Largo Caballero, prime minister of the Second Spanish Republic during the Spanish Civil War; the wife and children of the crown prince of Bavaria; Ukrainian nationalist leader Stepan Bandera; and several enemy soldiers and political dissidents.

Sachsenhausen was a labour camp, outfitted with several subcamps, a gas chamber, and a medical experimentation area.

While this more easily enabled group executions, it created too much initial panic among the prisoners, making them harder to control.

These trials showed the authorities that this method facilitated the means to murder the largest number of prisoners without "excessive" initial panic.

So by September 1941, when they were conducting the first trials of this method at Auschwitz, Sachsenhausen had already been the scene of "some gassings in conjunction with the development of gas vans".

The "protective custody" internment camp was laid out in an isosceles triangle with sides 600 m (2,000 ft) long.

Designed by Bernhard Kuiper, Himmler called Sachsenhausen a "completely new concentration camp for the modern age, which can be extended at any time."

[4]: 38–43, 85 Overall, at least 30,000 inmates died in Sachsenhausen from causes such as exhaustion, disease, malnutrition and pneumonia, as a result of the poor living conditions.

Prisoners of war were made to run up to 40 km (25 mi) a day with heavy packs, sometimes after being given performance-boosting drugs like cocaine, to trial military boots in tests commissioned by shoe factories.

Designed to increase stamina and endurance, this drug, supposedly consisting of a cocktail of cocaine, methamphetamine (Pervitin), and oxycodone (Eukodal),[16] was designed to see use from members of the Wehrmacht, Kriegsmarine and Luftwaffe to enhance mission performance where endurance and exhaustion become pertinent issues.

While these drugs were used in their individual forms by all branches of the German military, the nature and use there of D-IX specifically (especially experimentation upon Sachsenhausen prisoners) lacks enough substantiation to be considered credible, though experiments by the Nazis upon unwilling prisoners utilizing psychoactive compounds is far from myth, and could hardly be ruled outside the realm of plausibility.

Four SOE agents led by Lt Cdr Mike Cumberlege RNR, who took part in the 1943 Operation Locksmith in Greece intended to blow up the Corinth Canal and were captured in May 1943, were held in Sachsenhausen's Zellenbau isolation cells for more than a year before being executed in February/March 1945.

The Zellenbau of about 80 cells held some of World War II's most persistent Allied escapees as well as German dissidents, Nazi deserters and nationalists from East Europe such as the Ukrainian leader Taras Bulba-Borovets whom the Nazis hoped to persuade to change sides and fight the Soviets.

Most of the prisoners were physically exhausted and thousands did not survive this death march; those who collapsed en route were shot by the SS.

[4]: 126–143 According to an article published on 13 December 2001 in The New York Times: "In the early years of the war the SS practiced methods of mass killing there that were later used in the Nazi death camps.

Nazi functionaries were held in the camp, as were political prisoners and inmates sentenced by Soviet Military Tribunals.

[25] The injustice of the continued use of the National Socialist concentration camps by the Soviet occupying power and the renewed agonising deaths of thousands of people associated with it were concealed or played down by the SED regime.

who became President of Czechoslovakia, for his alleged role in the murder of Dutch prisoners during his time as a kapo at the camp.

In the GDR, various subsequent trials took place against members of the SS guards of Sachsenhausen concentration camp, such as Roland Puhr and Arnold Zöllner.

In 1960, a trial against SS-Hauptscharführer and Blockführer Richard Bugdalle for the murder of concentration camp inmates took place before the Munich II Regional Court.

In March 2009 Josias Kumpf, 83 was deported from Wisconsin back to Austria after having been found to have been a SS Guard at KZ Sachsenhausen and Trawniki.

[28] In May 2022, a trial began in Germany against a SS guard at KZ Sachsenhausen of SS-Rottenführer Josef Schütz age 101.

[33] After the Soviets vacated the site, it was used for some years by East Germany's "Kasernierte Volkspolizei", notionally a police division and in reality a precursor of the country's own National People's Army, which was formally established in 1956.

[23] The plans involved the removal of most of the original buildings and the construction of an obelisk, statue and meeting area, reflecting the outlook of the government of East Germany of that time.

[35] It was controlled by the Ministry of Culture, and as the National Memorial Sites Buchenwald and Ravensbrück, Sachsenhausen served as place of identification and legitimisation of the GDR.

The memorial obelisk contains eighteen red triangles, the symbol the Nazis gave to political prisoners, usually communists.

Based on reporting in the newspaper Neues Deutschland, historian Anne-Kathleen Tillack-Graf shows how the Sachsenhausen National Memorial Site was politically instrumentalised in the GDR, especially during the celebrations for the liberation of the concentration camp.

As of 2015[update], the site of the Sachsenhausen camp, at 22, Strasse der Nationen in Oranienburg, is open to the public as a museum and a memorial.

[38] Following the discovery in 1990 of mass graves from the Soviet period, a separate museum was opened documenting the camp's Soviet-era history.

[41] Sites within Sachsenhausen and Dachau which had been approved for inclusion in the augmented reality smartphone game Ingress were removed in July 2015; Gabriele Hammerman, director of the memorial site at Dachau, told the Deutsche Presse-Agentur that Google's actions were a humiliation for victims and relatives of the Nazi camps, and Niantic Labs' founder John Hanke stated that "we apologize that this has happened.