Dachau

    Our final full day in Munich, we decided to visit the nearby memorial site for the former concentration camp of Dachau.  We took a guided tour of the memorial site, and had a very tiny, very Irish man who told us all about the site and the former concentration camp on our way through.
    I'll write a bit of what I learned on the tour and save the pictures for the end.

    Dachau was originally chosen as a site for a concentration camp because it already had many of the structures (such as fencing, etc) required for the camp.  Dachau served as a model, both in the camp setup and in prisoner treatment, for all other concentration camps.  The site was opened in 1933 and used to house political prisoners--not Jews!  The political prisoners would have to be "re-educated" in a military-style way, with meaningless labor (moving stones from one place to another, and then back; digging a pit and then filling it back up) and very strict rules until they were fit to be released.  The re-education was designed to break the spirits of Hitler's political opponents. They were forbidden to speak of their imprisonment after their release.
   In 1938, Jews and other "unwanted" races such as Roma and Siri people began arriving at the camp, and Dachau evolved into the concentration camp we think of today, with one major exception--it was not a death factory.  While tens of thousands of people died here, there were no mass exterminations like at Auschwitz.  The approximate count was about 40,000 dead from Dachau, while over 1 million were killed at Auschwitz.  However, prisoners from Dachau were routinely sent to Auschwitz for extermination.  Dachau did have a gas chamber, but it was mostly used for experiments, not mass murders.
    The conditions at Dachau were unspeakably horrible.  Guards routinely murdered prisoners for no reason, or would torture them until they could no longer work, and then kill them because they weren't working. There were many medical experiments performed on prisoners as well. The camp was filthy, disease-infested, and essentially a pit of death.
    At the liberation of Dachau, one of the American units found a train nearby full of bodies to be cremated at Dachau.  The memorial at Dachau showed some of the pictures and the original footage from the discovery; it was horrifically appalling.  The bodies were so wasted away that I couldn't even tell they were human remains.
    When the camp was finally liberated on April 29, 1945, the American troops were so horrified at the conditions in the camp and at the mounds of bodies waiting to be burned that they murdered between 30 and 50 SS guards on the spot.  While the incident was investigated, the soldiers responsible were never charged.

     Of all the surviving concentration camps, Dachau is by far the best preserved.  All the buildings and crematoriums are original, with the exception of the barracks, which were so disgusting and filled with vermin that they had to be destroyed.

"Work makes you free."

"Smoking is forbidden"--to taunt prisoners when they first arrived.

Model of whipping post used by guards.  Although this and other tortures were eventually outlawed by Nazi command because too many prisoners were dying, Dachau guards continued to torture using these methods.

A young boy, victim to Nazi medical experiments.This particular experiment involved altitude changes for plane pilots. When the Americans liberated Dachau, they confiscated all the medical research, and it's never been heard from since.

Recreation of the barracks.

Communal toilets.

"Think on how we died here."

The opening where the gas canisters would be dropped for the gas chamber.

"Shower." The gas chamber.

Inside the gas chamber.

The large crematorium.

Small crematorium.

Memorial to the countless victims.

   Perhaps it is a bit gruesome to visit such a place, but I think it is so important to see a concentration camp and realize just how evil the human soul can become.  The Nazis did not all start out this way--it wasn't just people with a history of cruelty who got attracted to the party and to the SS.  Many were everyday people, just like you and just like me, who got sucked in by propaganda and lost their sense of right and wrong.  Granted, I'm sure many of the guards were predisposed to cruelty before the war, but so many of them were normal before. I'm not excusing them; I just think that the potential for atrocity lies in everyone, whether we like it or not. One of the most chilling exhibits displayed letters from a Dachau SS guard to his home, and he begins by being disgusted by the whole camp and the way it was run.  By the end of the series of letters, he would write home and calmly list off how many Jews he had murdered that day, and say it was a good day.  It was awful. Awful. I'll never forget.