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.