Dachau

While in Munich I visited Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site. Dachau is a town about 20 minutes from Munich and very easily accessible. While I was not particularly excited about going there, I felt like I needed to. And though it wasn't the most enjoyable day, I am very glad that I went. Everyone should go.

I planned to go by myself, but I found out that the New Europe tour company offered a guided tour from Munich, so I joined that group. It was a good decision. The visit would have been overwhelming and terribly sad alone.

I had thought that Dachau was just the concentration camp, but it is actually a whole town with the camp on the outskirts. After driving through the town, a cheery cafe and visitor's center are the first things you see after disembarking from the bus. Not what I was expecting. Walk a little ways down a gravel path and you arrive at the entrance to the camp.

You walk through the famous gate with the words "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work shall set you free" or the more concise "Work liberates") set into the ironwork. This was all a lie, of course. The harder a prisoner worked the faster he died.

Once through the gate it is Roll Call Square. A huge, empty space where prisoners and guards would assemble throughout the day. To the left in this picture are barracks and to the right are administrative buildings with offices and places where prisoners would be processed once they arrived. Now those buildings house a museum and memorials.

The barracks were all destroyed after the war. They were in horrible condition during the camp's operation, and then afterwards they were used to house soldiers, prisoners, and refugees. They deteriorated until they were finally torn down. Two reconstructed barracks stand there today. They are set up to show the different phases of Dachau.

Dachau was the very first concentration camp. It was built in 1933 and continued to operate until the Americans liberated it in 1945. The first prisoners were political enemies of the Nazi party. Later, Jewish people, homosexuals, Catholics, Gypsies, artists, Jehovah's Witnesses, the handicapped, Poles, etc...everyone Hitler deemed sub-human were sent here. Dachau was the only camp in existence during the entire twelve years of the Third Reich. It was the "model" camp that others were based on. There was even an SS training facility at Dachau where soldiers and guards were housed and turned into prime fighting Nazis. Dachau is also unique among the camps because just about every terrible thing that the Nazis did happened there. It was not "just" an "extermination facility," for instance. It was first a work camp, but medical and scientific experiments happened there, executions happened there, the "final solution" happened there...It is estimated that 200,000 people were prisoners at Dachau during the twelve years of its existence, and that about 26,000 died there, though precise numbers will probably never be known. Record keeping became increasingly inaccurate toward the end of the war, so they don't know how many people actually were sent to the camp or how many people were murdered or died there.

The reconstructions of the barracks are a good visual slap in the face. At first each prisoner had his own little space and bunk and a shelf for his things. Then in the next room you see what the sleeping space looked like a little later on...no shelf, tiny personal space, smaller bunk. Then in the next room...no dividers between the bunks so that more people could be squished in. At one point, 2000 people were living in barracks designed for 200.

I won't talk any more about the atrocities and the terrible, awful, unimaginable things that happened there since it is just too much and I am afraid that to try to write about it would trivialize it and I don't want to do that.

Instead I will focus on how the camp has been turned into a memorial site and what is there now. One of the most memorable parts for me was the huge sculpture that is placed directly in front of what was the headquarters of the camp. It looks like barbed wire from a distance.

Once closer you can see abstract, twisted human figures struggling in agony and entangled in what looks like a fence. Everything is black metal. The sculpture is in memory of the prisoners who flung themselves into the electrified fences surrounding the camp in order to commit suicide. Not much more to say. If you want a closer look.*

A road runs down the camp.

Barracks used to be on either side, but now there are raised, numbered gravel foundations outlining where the buildings used to be. They are supposed to symbolize mass graves.

Because so few of the original buildings are standing, it was difficult to understand the massive scale of the camp. Then I saw this picture:

It was taken right after liberation in 1945 and shows the road and the barracks and all the people. So huge.

The crematorium, which had to be expanded since the death rate kept increasing, and the gas chambers are outside of the main camp walls. Interestingly, they don't know if mass murders happened in the gas chambers. They were a fairly late addition at Dachau and the documentation is elusive. Although most likely the gas chambers were used (horribly labelled "showers" to keep prisoners from refusing to enter), there is no conclusive evidence.

There are plaques by the larger crematorium remembered several female British agents/soldiers who were murdered there. I did not know this, but many POWs and Resistance fighters were taken to Dachau (and other camps) and executed.

While some of the people on the tour watched a 20 minute documentary on Dachau and the Holocaust, I walked down the road to see the memorials that stand at the end of it. (I went to the Holocaust Museum in Washington, D.C. ten or twelve years ago and the videos that they played from the medical experiments and the pictures of the bodies piled outside the crematoriums and the shoes and the eyeglasses still stick so I did not feel that I needed to see more. Plus, I was curious about the monuments that people chose to build at the camp.)

There are four religious memorials: a Russian Orthodox one stands just outside the camp walls, a Protestant one is on the left, a Catholic one (the first to be built) at the very end of the road, and a Jewish one to the right.

I didn't have time to leave the camp and see the Russian Orthodox building. The Protestant one is a modern structure that rises and falls in grey stone. I think it is an actual church with services and everything. The Catholic memorial is a big, roofed hollow column with the front part cut out. So perhaps a three quarter circle is a better description? Oh geometric vocabulary, where are you? A very large crucifix is in the center. On Fridays you can go in and have a silent prayer service with a priest. The Jewish monument was the most interesting to me.

You walk down the ramp:

And find yourself in a dark underground room. One band of light colored stone shoots up the far wall and ends in a circle of light. Your eye naturally follows it from the dark floor straight up to the sky.

I like the physical action of walking down into the pit and then rising up through your gaze. It was powerful.

Behind the memorials is the camp wall and an old guard tower. Now that area behind the wall is a Carmelite convent. What? At least that was my reaction.
Apparently someone donated the land and a Catholic bishop, who was a Dachau survivor, started the convent. Here is the old guard tower up close.

So there is a community of nuns living just outside of Dachau. Literally just. Here is a picture of the chapel taken about a step on the other side of the guard tower. It is hard for me to imagine living there for several reasons, the main one being that Dachau makes you question God--how could He let this happen? So living there as a nun would require extraordinary faith. But I guess if you are a nun you have to have that anyway.

I walked into the chapel and heard the private service going on behind a screened altar. Pretty amazing and unexpected to have a beautiful sanctuary like this at Dachau. The memorials and especially the convent gave a positive hint to what would otherwise be an incredibly traumatic and overwhelmingly agonizing place. I applaud the Dachau memorial site people for what they have done. It is a good mix of what happened, an attempt to give the historical context and reasons why it happened, and a focus on what we do with it now. The site emphasizes remembering in order to prevent something like this from ever happening again. As this memorial so perfectly puts it:

My guide told me that all German soldiers are taken to Dachau and given an extensive tour. They are told that if they are ever asked to do something which conflicts with their basic humanity, they should stop and raise the alarm. What looked like a group of 7th or 8th grade students were at the camp the same time that my group was. While visiting Dachau when you are that young could be rough, I think it is great that Germany takes such pains to educate and remember. We all need to.

There were about twenty young people from all over the world on the tour, which met in Munich at 10am, which is pretty early for that crowd, especially in a beer capital like Munich. And that was just the first of two daily tours! It was encouraging that so many people made the effort to see Dachau.

On the way out of the gates I stopped for a picture of one of the two plaques honoring the American liberators of Dachau. Although difficult to read, this one is in honor of the 20th Armored Division who entered the camp on April 29th, 1945. It made me very proud.

It is hard to fathom everything that happened there and the number of people...and I am still pondering over what I saw. It was a rough day, but I am glad that I went.

*I am usually an unabashed shutter bug, but it felt a little profane to snap away at this place. So I didn't get that many pictures.