When Soviet troops liberated Sachsenhausen in April 1945, they did not dismantle the camp — they reopened it. NKVD Special Camp Nr. 7 operated on the same grounds from 1945 to 1950, incarcerating tens of thousands of Germans: former Nazi officials and SS members, but also social democrats, trade unionists, and ordinary people caught up in denunciation and suspicion. Conditions were terrible; estimates suggest that between 12,000 and 20,000 prisoners died, most from hunger and disease. The bodies were buried in mass graves that were only rediscovered after German reunification.
The museum sits within the Sachsenhausen memorial complex and focuses on this second, Soviet-era phase of the camp's history. For many years, the existence of the Soviet camps was suppressed in East Germany, making the subject politically sensitive even after the wall came down. The exhibition documents individual fates alongside the broader political context, drawing on testimonies of survivors and the records recovered from Soviet archives after 1990. It is a necessary counterpart to the Nazi-era memorial — a reminder that the same ground served two different systems of repression within a decade.