Dachau

It's been a while. I've been in and out of a crappy apathetic/depressed mood for the last month or two and so I haven't really been up to much worth talking about lately, hence no updates. As of right now, my classes are all finished up and I only have a week left before I fly out. At this point I'm ready to get back to the States and feel like I'm doing something productive with my life. This will probably be my last update from over here, though I might post some thoughts/reflections once I get back. We'll see.

The fact that my time over here is almost up energized me to take care of some business before I left. I felt like I owed it to myself to visit one of the Nazi concentration camps while I was over here, so this last Tuesday I headed down to Dachau, which is just outside of Munich. Dachau is one of the earliest established concentration camps and is symbolic of the camps that were set up inside of Germany.

The system of concentration camps was established in 1933 as a place to store the thousands of "dissidents" arrested as Hitler consolidated his power under the auspice of punishing those responsible for the Reichstag fire. Dachau was one of these camps, and was presented as a work/reeducation camp. Over the course of Hitler's rule, the list of undesirable groups grew and the camps became increasingly crowded and the treatment of prisoners increasingly barbaric. Although Dachau remained a work/concentration camp throughout the war, and not an extermination camp such as Auschwitz, it was still the site of many atrocities including horific medical experimentation, mass execution, hangings, beatings, starvation and disease. All of this occured not in distant Nazi occupied territory, but under the noses of the German people.

Just a heads up, as you might expect, some of these pictures can be pretty upsetting.

Prisoners entered the camp through the gate in this building (see above), which housed SS interrogation rooms and some administrative offices

Inside the reconstructed barracks - they had several rooms set up to demonstrate how the quarters looked throughout the history of the camp - each of the barracks is 10m by 100m and was built to house 200 prisoners, by the end of the war they were housing about 2,000 prisoners.

1933-37

1938


1938 living room

final arrangement




Translation: Remember how we died here

Translation: To honor the dead and to remind the living

The old crematorium

The newer crematorium, built because the old was working beyond capacity


entrance to the gas chamber, marked as a shower

inside






map in the museum, showing the locations of concentration camps

German newspaper article about Dachau from the 30s which presents a rather rosy picture of the camp

As always, comments and questions are welcome.

Troy's visit

My brother Troy just left this past Thursday after a week long visit here in Regensburg. His visit cooincided nicely with what managed to be a 5 day weekend for me (thank you random Catholic holidays!) so we had plenty of time to travel around and drink beer. The first couple of days he was here I had class, so we started off with the requisite Regensburg city tour and I managed to get him hooked on the delicious mystery meat that is Döner pretty quickly.

On Friday we headed down to the Bavarian Alps with Heather, Anya, and Anya's friend Janie, who was in town for a visit as well. The trip down was interesting - we managed to narrowly avoid Janie getting fined for riding without a valid ticket and then another (more hefty) fine for misusing a Bayern Ticket. Thankfully, being resourceful and appearing dumb gets you pretty far.

After a 4 hour train ride and a quick bus ride, we ended up in Pfronten, a small resort town right on the northern edge of the Bavarian Alps. Right around the town there are a bunch of ruins of monasteries and castles perched on top of the mountains, so the plan was to go hike up and see one. Before we headed off, we decided to stop for lunch in a Biergarten, where we encountered a British gentleman who, though helpful at first, soon proved to be quite drunk and a bit lonely. After extracting ourselves from that situation, we wandered off in search of somewhere to hike. Unfortunately, at this point we realized that the train schedule was probably going to limit the extent of our hiking trip. We settled on a less ambitious hike but still managed to see quite a bit of the beautiful surroundings. After we got back to town we realized that we had misread our schedule and we actually had about 2 more hours than we had thought. By then it was pretty much too late and so we decided to just head back to Regensburg.


Here are some pictures of Pfronten:

Troy as navigator-in-chief

I didn't realize that goats don't have round pupils, which is creepy

The next day Troy and I headed over to Erlangen, a good sized town just outside Nuremberg. A friend of mine had tipped me off that they were holding a festival and I figured no trip to Bavaria is complete without experiencing that sort of spectacle. I ended up being rather surprised by the scale of it - Erlangen is about the size of Regensburg but there were a lot more people than I'd ever seen at our Dult.

Pictures:

The crowd - it got even worse later on

Dinner - Troy got a half of a chicken and a pretzel, i got the Bratwurst with potato salad.

This is Bruno, a guy who was having his bachelor party and was dragged on stage to sing drinking songs. His friends were wearing shirts that said "Bruno heiratet" (Bruno is getting married) and he is wearing a shirt that says "ich bin Bruno" (I'm Bruno).

Troy and I grinning like morons after 2 maßes each

Sunday we hiked over to Adlersberg, a little dorf about 6km outside Regensburg where they have a nice brewery and Biergarten. There is a nice walking trail that takes you there with a beautiful view of the countryside along the way. The walk is about 3 hours but thankfully one of the bus lines runs out there too so you dont have to walk back.

Here are some pictures I took the last time I went:

looking back towards Regensburg

The Donau

Monday I was pretty worn out and since it was a holiday, nothing was open so we didn't do too much.

On Tuesday we headed back over to Nuremberg. We wandered around town, had lunch at a Biergarten (noticing a trend?), saw the castle, checked out the old Nazi rally grounds and then called it a day. I didnt take too may pictures since I had already seen most of Nuremberg.

Anyway, I'll cut this off here but before we go, here is a picture of a diner in the Munich airport called Smokey Joes: