Remains of Station Z and Execution Trenches (Oranienburg)

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Station Z was the nickname that the SS gave to the execution site at Sachsenhausen. Beginning in the autumn of 1939, Station Z was the site where prisoners who had been condemned to death in a Nazi court were executed by a firing squad.
After the invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, the Russian Prisoners of War , were brought to Sachsenhausen to be executed, on the orders of Adolf Hitler. According to a pamphlet distributed at the Memorial Site, at least 12,000 Soviet Commissars were executed at Station Z in the Autumn of 1941.
Station Z is also the locaton of a gas chamber that was first put into operation in 1943, presumably to gas Russian POWs since there were no Jews in the camp at that time. At a Military Tribunal conducted by the Soviet Union in October 1947, Camp Commandant Anton Kaindl confessed to the gassing of prisoners, on his own authority, at Sachsenhausen.