Dachau and Sachsenhausen

This summer I had an opportunity to visit two concentration camps, Dachau and Sachsenhausen. Before this summer I had never been to a concentration camp and I didn't realize how heavy they would be. I also didn't know how different each camp was from the other and what they turned into during the last years of the war. Before learning everything this summer, I thought that the concentration camps were constantly killing prisoners in bulk. I didn't know this didn't happen until the later years of the war.
Something that really stuck out to me after visiting the two camps was how different they were and how similar they were. When I visited Dachau, it was sunny and hot, and when we visited Sachsenhausen it was misty and chilly. Immediately after walking through the gates of the concentration camp you see where they held roll call for the prisoners and my heart instantly fell, both times I visited. I was just complaining about the weather, even though it hardly effected me. Whereas people who lived in the camps had to stand still on these grounds for hours during roll call, and I had the audacity to mope about the weather.
But what stood out the most was the way the exterminations differed. Dachau had a working gas chamber, and Sachsenhausen mostly shot people in the backs of their head. Both were deeply saddening. In the last days of Dachau, the SS crammed as many people as they could into the gas chamber and incarcerator. When the US Troops found it they said the amount of bodies laying around were horrendous. In Sachsenhausen, we know that most people killed at this time were soviets and people who supported the communist movement. I thought it was outrageous that the Nazi's killed these people from the back like this because they didn't want it to affect their soldiers. That is something that really stood out to me. That the Nazi's didn't want to look these people in the eye when they murdered them. It was something that sort of humanized the Nazi's for me and see just how terrible of human beings they were. The Nazi's weren't monsters, or evil. When we say it like this, it dehumanizes them. The Nazi's were mass murdering human beings.