Dachau

History is important, and I couldn’t imagine coming to Germany without spending some time seeing and learning about the atrocities committed here during WWII. The Nazi party was formed here in Bavaria, and the original concentration camp, Dachau, served as the model they sought to copy as they expanded their labor and extermination camps across Central Europe.

The warm, pleasant weather felt like the wrong backdrop as we arrived in the memorial site. From a logistical point of view, it’s very easy to take the S2 train out here and either walk the trail of remembrance (following in the footsteps of prisoners who were forcibly marched from the train station), or take bus 726 straight to the visitor center. (The stop is KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau.) We cheated and took Uber, which was about 30€, and is not much faster than public transit, depending on where you’re coming from.

The design of the visitor center is somber but helpful, with convenient bathrooms, information, and a cafeteria for lunch. There’s the tail end of the trail of remembrance, and we walked back along part of it, up to sign number 8. It was informative in explaining the SS training camp that was attached to the concentration camp. And we came across a kindergarten, which just felt really out of place, but reminds you that this site is in the middle of a functioning city, that people lived here before this happened and they live here today.

After turning around and heading back, we went into the camp, passing the entry gate with its horrible lie, arbeit macht frei. It roughly means “work will set you free,” when in fact the nazis had no intention of ever letting these prisoners go. We learned that they viewed the healthy prisoners as useful labor until they got weak or sick and at that point they were either executed or let to die through starvation or disease.

Inside the main building is a series of informative signs grouped across many rooms that tell the history of the camp, how it was taken over by the SS, how they expanded the model to other camps, and about the people who were imprisoned, forced to work, and murdered here at Dachau.

I won’t retell the brutality and the history; you should read more or, if possible, come see the site itself. But a couple things that really stuck with me from the informative signs were quotes, both from the monsters responsible as well as from the victims.

A doctor, who experimented on prisoners against their will, leaving many injured or dead, writing a letter about the delightful lunch he had at the SS food hall.

A prisoner employed as a nurse to the other prisoners using more medicine and disinfectant than he was supposed to because he couldn’t let them stay sick if he could help it.

Himmler himself (often called the architect of the holocaust), writing that more prisoners were needed to work in the munitions factories supplied with forced labor because as many were being “lost” (dying due to disease and brutal conditions) as shipped in each month.

A secret diary of a man forced to work building an underground bunker, saying it had a high risk of collapsing on their heads and killing them, but at least it wasn’t as cold as having to work outside in winter.

There were so many more, and numbers that would baffle and horrify, but again, I’ll leave it to you to learn more.

We explored a restored barracks building (the originals were all torn down), seeing how tightly packed all the prisoners were, and the very limited sanitary facilities, and contemplated the visible array of foundations that demonstrate just how many barracks were crammed into the camp.

Finally, we visited the crematorium, which did include the furnaces for dealing with the volume of bodies the camp produced, but also was the site of death itself for many.

Walking in, we entered a room where prisoners would be told to strip to prepare for a shower, as a sanitary procedure. This led us directly into a starkly lit shower room, with the only clue as to its more gruesome use the airtight doors that would seal prisoners in. It was immediately adjacent to the furnace room, making disposal easy.

On the other side was a loading room for already dead bodies to be carted in for burning (as many died due to disease, being shot by guards, or due to the horrible working conditions). The ashes were dumped into pits dug in the ground nearby; flagstones now mark the locations, such as this memorial.

In the end, it’s impossible not to be emotional at a site like this, where some of the worst of what humans have done to each other is on display. It’s important to see, to remember, to remind ourselves of the fragility of life, to be vigilant against ever letting such monsters take power in the world again.

I appreciate that this memorial site is so well preserved and maintained, and I’m grateful I had the opportunity to come here.