Munchen (aka Munich) - Part 1 of 2 (Dachau)

Saturday, we went on a USO tour to Munich focusing on WWII significant sites. The guide did a good job showing us all the key places, though I how I envisioned the tour taking place and how it actually happened didn't match. I thought we'd tour around on the bus with some stops at Dachau, lunch and museums - but this isn't what happened...


We started out the day - in typical German fashion - getting stuck in a 50 mile long traffic jam (called a "Stau"). Arriving two hours late at Dachau ConcentrationCamp we met up with our guide. Since we were running late, we didn't spend as long at the camp as planned, but since the high temp yesterday was 27 degrees and most of the tour was outside, abbreviating it was fine by us!

Dachau is an interesting site to see for several reasons.

- It was the first concentration camp.

- It was built to hold political prisoners, then expanded to include other "unfavorables"

- It was a labor camp, those interred here were used as slave labor both in "workshops", on farms, and anywhere else needed.

- This was the first camp, so it was used to train SS before them went to the other camps.

- There is a gas chamber here, but they don't think it was ever used as an extermination camp, like Auschwitz (which is in Poland), in fact they believe it was never really used. They did use the big incinerators to burn all the dead, mostly from starvation and sickness.

- This is the only gas chamber in Germany.

- Water was never an issue, they always had fresh, clean water.

- It was the last camp to be liberated.

The second picture is the gate - the only way in and out of the camp. You can see in the middle of this a much smaller, door sized gate with the words "arbeit macht frei" (it's backward - I couldn't get a clean shot from the other side because of all the people!). This is the picture most often seen of Dachau, and I was surprised it was small and in the center of the other gate since it's normally the focus of photos. The words mean "work makes free".

The long buildings shown here, in the third picture, were the "barracks" buildings. There were 30 some of these buildings. The camp was built to hold 6,000 but had over 30,000 in it at the end. In front of the barracks is the large yard where the prisoners had to muster every day.

We also saw the crematorium buildings, the gas chamber, and were able to warm up in the museum where we watched a documentary on the camp.

Even though countless people died in this camp, were tourtured, and were experimented on, that was never the primary focus. This place was about slave labor. While the gas chamber creeped me out, the thing I found most shocking was the map at the top of the blog. Each and every one of the squares and triangles was a concentration camp. The darker squares were the main ones with several smaller hub ones around the outside. They started this system in 1933. It really illustrates why the Germans didn't do anything to stop the attrocities - why they let these camps exist. The answer is simple - if they protested or argued against them, they'd quickly find themselves prisoners. The Nazi's were at war with their own people first, years before WWII began.