On an uninspiring street in a housing estate in central Berlin there is a house that has been built on top of the bunker in which Adolf Hitler committed suicide. There is no plaque or memorial to commemorate this event, and that is as it should be. Further out of town, in the pretty suburb of Spandau, the prison in which Rudolph Hess was incarcerated until his death has been demolished to make way for a supermarket, and that is as it should be too – a small victory for the mundane and commonplace over unimaginable horror.

In the northern suburb of Oranienburg, amongst the bungalows, herbaceous borders, and manicured lawns, squats the former concentration camp of Sachsenhausen. This – singularly and correctly – has been preserved against memory waste. You arrive outside the gates, canopied with the legend ‘arbeit macht frie’ – work brings freedom – and you arrive too early. But you are already too late, too late; at Sachsenhausen it is always too late. This was the main training centre for the soldiers who would later staff the death camps to the east. Indeed, it was a death camp itself – of the 200,000 souls who trudged through these gates less than half survived. As you enter, you study the low-slung outbuildings arranged in a perfect triangle and you realise that if architecture is indeed frozen music then here is a symphony of horror

You want, more than anything else in this world to help them, but you cannot because they are dead. ...

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You try to join the orderly queue filing through the museum buildings, but the sheer weight of it all is raping your brain. Tens of thousands of signatures spider across the walls and wrap you in a web of horror that threatens suffocation. You make a break for the open ground, where most of the accommodation huts would have been, and you notice the ground. Nothing grows here, the soil is ash grey, emaciated, stained forever with the straitiated bones of a 100,000 skeletons. You try to cleanse yourself in the rods of stinging rain that sluice across the old camp, holding your head to the heavens you see it everywhere. Crooked rain. Crooked rain.

You run for shelter to the blunt, flat roofed building, which runs parallel to the perimeter fence. Everything has pointed you towards this room; at its centre is a white, black veined, marble pathology table. Worn leather straps at top and bottom, blood drains on either side. This room is where some of the doctors at Sachsenhausen conducted their experiments on human beings – without anaesthetic – injecting them with gangrene, spraying them with mustard gas, flaying them alive. Your skin feels like broken light bulbs, your lungs fill with black ashes; there is no air in the room. It is impossible to fill up the silence; the inexplicable cold scrapes at your bones. In the cellar beneath your feet the dismembered corpses were crammed to the roof beams. Somebody’s mother, somebody’s son.

You descend into that cellar and in the anthracite, all enveloping, darkness, you dimly discern two people moving towards you, a naked woman, whose body is covered in liverish bruises, and a child, whose arms are full of broken things. You want, more than anything else in this world, to help them – to offer succour – but you cannot because they are dead.

National Holocaust Remembrance Day – 27th January

Photograph by Will Palmer