Dachau Concentration Camp

Today was a very sobering experience as we spent the afternoon at Dachau Concentration Camp.  A bit of the history.  On March 22, 1933, a few weeks after Adolf Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, a concentration camp for political prisoners was set up on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau.  This was the first concentration camp and served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a "school of violence" for the SS men who would command these camps.  In 1938 the camps prison population expanded to include Jews, criminals, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, mixed races and anti social persons from Germany, Austria and conquered territories. Also starting in 1938, arriving prisoners were to hand over their clothing and all possessions (money, rings, watches, etc.) and were given prison garb and a colored badge that categorized them (white for mentally impaired, red for communists/socialists, green for criminals, pink for homosexuals, etc. Jews wore yellow badges plus other colors if they were also criminals, homosexuals, etc.).  The camp had 30 barracks that were meant to hold 200 prisoners each but after 1938 up to 2,000 prisoners were held in each of these barracks creating massive overcrowding, unsanitary conditions and starvation. During the twelve years of its existence over 200,000 people were imprisoned here and there were 31,951 documented deaths (thousands more were undocumented).  On April 29, 1945, American troops liberated the survivors.

The Memorial Site was established in 1965 on the grounds of the concentration camp due to the initiative of the surviving prisoners who had joined together to form the International Committee of Dachau

The prisoners were marched from the train station and through this etrance gate to be processed

The sign on the entrance gate says Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Will Make You Free).  This reflected Nazi propaganda which trivialized concentration camps as labor and re-education camps, when in fact forced labor was used as a method of torture

 

 Looking at the parade grounds, the two rows of barracks and one of the guard towers as you entered Dachau.  The parade grounds was where all prisoners had to come and stand at attention for the twce daily roll call, which could take hours and where public punishments were administered

 A view at the electrified barbed wire fence, ditch, one of the seven guard towers and some of the 30 rows of raised gravel beds where the prison barracks once stood

The original crematorium with its two overns was built in 1940 to handle the disposal of the ever increasing number of dead and murdered prisoners   

In 1942 this crematorium was built to handle four times the capacity of the original one as well as having rooms that looked like communal showers but were in fact gas chambers that could hold 150 prisinors at a time

 A 1955 memorial to the prisoners that depicts all the badge color catagories.  There are four badges that have no colors in them which represent homosexuals, criminals,  mentally impared and the anti-social (gypsies, homeless, unemployed, etc.).  At the time the memorial was created it was felt that these people were not worthy of recognition