In 1941 Sachsenhausen concentration camp became the first of the existing pre war concentration camps to become a site of mass killings as 9,000 Soviet POWs were murdered there by gas or shooting. Heinrich Himmler, anxious to find more efficient methods of mass murder, was kept informed by his henchman Theodore Eicke and took a keen interest in the killings, knowing that the methods used at Sachsenhausen would be later employed in the mass murder of the Jews.

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