Dachau

My second Sunday of Europe we visited Dachau, which is located just outside the city of Dachau just northwest of Munich. We took a guided tour that left from Munich's Hauptbahnhof. I found it sort of fitting that I would visit this place since we didn't go to church on Sunday.

The first photo is of the gate to the main part of the camp, where the most people stayed. Dachau was the first concentration camp, beginning in 1933. They used this phrase on the gates of all the other camps, too, and it's translation is 'work makes one free', and it overflows with ironies.

The second photo was horizontal, I'm not sure what happened, but anyway, it shows some of the things that were taken from the people interned in the camp upon arrival. Dachau was a work camp. They took photographs, marriage licenses, letters, every personal possession of these people was removed from them.

The third photograph shows one of the walls of the main building where the people were first brought to be stripped of all they had, and written on the wall is 'no smoking'. No matter that all their possessions had been taken and they had nothing to smoke, this sort of thing was all about the exercise of power by the Nazis.

Fourth is an example of the beds the camp held in later years. As the years went on the situation for the people interned in the camp grew worse, less sanitary, and more crowded. This example is where the bunks no longer had personal divisions, and people were just thrown into a row until the space was more than too full.

Fifth is the ditch that was dug before the fence in later years. There was a strip of grass around the perimeter of the camp in front of the fence, and the grass was off limits, with guards in towers to shoot anyone who broke that rule. After a while, however, the Nazi power was a bit undermined, because stepping on the grass became a form of assisted suicide. Then they began shooting to wound, rather than kill, so the prisoners would throw themselves onto the electric line that ran at the base of the fence. In order to stop this the Nazis ordered this ditch dug, too wide to successfully jump and land on the wire in one move.

Sixth is the ovens in the crematorium. These were the newer ones, built after the original ones, which were smaller, could no longer keep up with the demands of the camp. Through the years of operation the camp multiplied in numbers of interned people, mostly men because Dachau was a work camp and women were considered useless eaters.

The last three photos are memorials from different groups. The first was one artist, and one actually descends for some distance before finally standing under this imperious monument, which represents walking toward the Nazi regime, and how it seems less imposing from far away, but the downhill to it becomes easier than turning back, and before you know it it towers above you. The middle one was created under the auspices of the Holocaust survivor group, and if you look carefully some of the triangles are missing. The artist had plans for triangles to represent each group of people who were persecuted and died in the Holocaust, but the official Holocaust survivor group refused to allow the triangles for the capos (German prisoners who were put in charge of other prisoners in the camps-some were in line with Nazi ideology, but there were plenty who did all they could to help fellow prisoners-), gypsies, and homosexuals, because they said they didn't want to be associated with 'those people'. The last monument speaks for itself.