Sachsenhausen Deaths (Registered at the Oranienburg Civil Registry Office)

This database includes 1,504 records of deaths in Sachsenhausen, from the Oranienburg Civil Registry Office.

Background

The Sachsenhausen concentration camp in Oranienburg, north of Berlin, was one of the first concentration camps.  In 1938 after Kristallnacht, thousands of Jews, primarily from Berlin, were sent there.  While most were released after a few months, some died there.  In the following years relatively few Jews were sent to Sachsenhausen until the last year of WWII when thousands were transferred to Sachsenhausen from camps in the East.

Sachsenhausen is unusual in that it is the only major concentration camp memorial site (Gedenkstätte) which has never issued a memorial book.  To some extent this can be explained by the events of 1945.  When the Russians liberated Sachsenhausen, they transferred all camp records to Moscow, where they were extremely difficult to access.  More recently, institutions – including the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) – were permitted to copy this material.  Unfortunately, the collection was in poor physical shape and parts of it, primarily 1942-1944, had been lost or destroyed.  Separately, I digitized name lists for the first few years and the last year of the camp (see " Sachsenhausen Arrivals & Departures, Oct 1940-Jun 1941" and "Sachsenhausen Deaths - July 1944 till Liberation"). 

While the Russians had seized all the records at the camp, they were unaware that in the early years, deaths at the camp had been routinely registered at the Oranienburg civil registry office.  An official of the Gedenkstätte copied the names of all Jews registered at the civil registry office and gave me a copy.

This collection covers the period from 1938 to 1942.  Researchers seeking copies of the death certificates themselves may request copies at the Standesamt in Oranienburg.

Database

This database includes 1,504 records of Sachsenhausen deaths from the Oranienburg Civil Registry Office.  The fields for this database are as follows:

• Name (Surname + Given name)
• Date of Birth
• Place of Birth
• Last Residence - Town / Country
• Last Residence - Street Address
• Occupation (Note 1)
• Marital Status (Note 2)
• Spouse's Name (Surname + Given Name)
• Date of Death

Note 1: Occupations.  To help translate the entries in the Occupations field, please see JewishGen's InfoFile at http://www.jewishgen.org/InfoFiles/GermanOccs.htm.

Note 2: Marital Status.  The table below gives the translations from the original source document in the Marital Status field.

Acknowledgments

The information contained in this database was indexed from the files of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (EE 3451).  The original source material was filmed at the Jewish Community in Stuttgart, Germany.  Freija Lindholm and Kurt Friedlaender, JewishGen volunteers, transcribed the list.

In addition, thanks to JewishGen Inc. for providing the website and database expertise to make this database accessible.  Special thanks to Warren Blatt and Michael Tobias for their continued contributions to Jewish genealogy.  Particular thanks to Nolan Altman, coordinator of Holocaust files.

Nolan Altman
Coordinator - Holocaust Database
January 2010

Searching the Database

This database is searchable via JewishGen's Holocaust Database and the JewishGen Germany Database.