Dachau

Dachau wasn't one of the places I really *wanted* to go, but it was a place that I felt like I should see while we live here. WWII is part of history and the best way to ensure we don't repeat history is to learn about it. Having said that, Katherine is way too young to comprehend something like that and I was afraid it would seem so unreal to David that he might not fully understand or be able to comprehend the magnitude.

So, John and I decided not long after we got here that we would go one day while the kids were in school. We put it off through the winter since terrible weather would make the visit even worse. Last Friday was a beautiful day outside, so we decided this was the day to go. Dachau is only about a 20 minute drive from the kids' school, so it's close by.

We dropped the kids off and then set off to the town of Dachau. We actually first went to a palace that overlooks the town.

 There is only one room of the palace open to the public, but there is also a gorgeous garden outside. Since we went the first official day of Spring and the palace was a summer home, we were imagining how amazing the garden must be in the summer. It's still very nice now, but the summer is probably really something to see. We just might have to make a trip back.

When it was closer to time for the Dachau memorial to open, we headed that way. John knew about an English speaking tour that we wanted to make soon after they opened.

The group we ended up touring with had several Americans, a family from Stuttgart and a few people from New Zealand. After learning about the area immediately surrounding the camp and a little bit of history of the camp, we walked toward the entrance to the actual camp. We walked where the prisoners walked, then stopped where the building was where they were registered. We turned to our right to enter through a building with a gate.

Translating, this says "Work makes you free." This was the philosophy of the camp. Initially, the Nazis actually brainwashed the prisoners into believing that if they work hard enough, they would be set free. Dachau was the first and last functioning concentration camp of the Hitler era. Originally, the purpose of the camp was to imprison the people who opposed the Nazi regime - so this might have been social democrats, communists or other political enemies of Hitler and his party. The Nazi party claimed it was protecting its people by imprisoning those that disagreed with them. 

This is the Jourhous (entrance building) from inside the camp. You can see the gate from before:

Next to the building there is a map detailing what went on in that building and what it was used for.

Upon entering the camp, there is a vast, empty area. This was the area used for roll call of the prisoners, twice per day. Each roll call lasted for hours.

The 2 buildings you see in the picture above are recreations of the barracks where the prisoners were housed. The original barracks were torn down; however, these two were rebuilt to give visitors and the memorial more of a sense of what the camp was like. Not pictured, but to the right of the above picture is the Maintenance Building. This is a large, L shaped building which formed the south edge of the roll call area.

The picture above is an inscription at the front of the role call area. Behind it, you can see a monument that was designed by a Dachau survivor and erected in 1968. This is one of the more famous images of present-day Dachau and when we talked about what it depicted, it was as heart-wrenching as the rest of the tour.

Also in front of the Maintenance Building is another monument commemorating the "badges" that were worn by every prisoner in the camp. There are 3 badges missing from the monument, which was erected in 1968. Those are the pink triangle worn by homosexuals, the black triangle worn by anti-socials (usually social outcasts), and the green triangle of the criminal prisoners. Our guide went into detail about her ideas of why those groups were not included in the memorial in 1968 and reading online, I see that this has been a topic of discussion by those running the memorial site since the 80s. Personally, I think it's time to include those "forgotten victims" in a more inclusive memorial.

We walked through the maintenance building which includes where prisoners were stripped of all their worldly belongings and showered with acid-water (so as to disinfect) and then given a uniform. They told us about the punishment areas of the building - where the punishments, as I'm sure you can imagine, were horrific. The humanity of the people carrying out these punishments is so foreign to me that I honestly can't imagine it.

Also there was a model of the camp. We spent quite a bit of time in here, but I've diagrammed on top of the picture on thing I think is an interesting fact about the camp. To the right of the red line is the concentration camp area. To the left of the red line is the SS Camp. They were right next to each other. At the end of the war, about the time the US forces came to liberate the camp, there were 46,000 people in the concentration camp and 1,500 people in the SS camp. The size difference says it all.

More about the logistics - each barrack building was built to hold about 200 people. By the end of the war, the crowded barracks were housing over 2,000 people.

We continued our walk behind the barracks you saw earlier toward the Crematorium. I do have pictures of this, but honestly, it hurts my heart to see them, so I don't want them on the blog. The crematorium was a difficult memorial to walk through. I can't put into words what it was like, other than very eerie. To know that so many countless and still unnamed people were there for no reason is still astounding to me. I like the picture above, where you can see a steeple peering out over the trees from inside the camp. This steeple is from the Russian-Orthodox Chapel which was erected in 1995 as a memorial.

Below, this is a picture of the area where the other barracks once stood. There were 50 barracks there when the camp was active and the curbs you see below represent where each one stood. Far in the background, you can see the back of the ones in the earlier pictures.

We learned that the purpose of Dachau was officially a work prison. This is in comparison to Auschwitz which was known as a death camp. Prisoners were often transported between camps though and our guide told of a man who was at both - he survived Auschwitz and said he worked much harder there than he did at Dachau. She used that illustration to point out how the Nazi party just put out whatever they wanted to about the camps, not basing any of it on reality.

She also told us of the evacuation march - when the Nazis knew they were losing and that Dachau would be liberated soon, they forced about 16,000 of the prisoners to begin a march toward the Alps. This was in order to soften their crimes for the trials they had to know were coming. Countless and nameless people also died in this march. Those that were liberated left the camp with literally no possessions. When the economy of the world was in such a terrible place, later, the US forces re-opened the camp as a displaced persons camp. Some of the very same people who were imprisoned in Dachau later had to return there as they had no where else to go. While the conditions would have been much better then, it doesn't diminish the fact that they were returning to a place of untold horror.

It was a tough day, but one that John and I learned from. It's not the easiest tour to blog about because it wasn't fun, it wasn't exciting, but it was certainly memorable. I don't think I'll ever forget it...with or without a blog post to remind me.