(Re-edited to fix a couple of typos.)
Today we, my wife and I, went on a guided tour of Dachau, the Nazi Concentration Camp near Munich.
The site is now the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. It’s been preserved in as close to it’s original condition as can be managed, given it’s multi-staged history.
The site started as an ammunition factory Circa WW1 and closed after the surrender terms restricted German rearmament. The abandoned factory was chosen as the site of the first concentration camp when Hitler came to power and operated throughout the war, being the last to be liberated. Although relatively small compared to some of the later camps it provided the model for a lot of the evil that was perpetrated in those camps. The sadistic motto “Arbeit macht frei” started here and is wrought into the entrance gate.*
Dachau was a work camp; labour was the product, death was a by-product. Unlike the extermination camps such as Auschwitz-Birkenau further to the east where the priorities were reversed. The inmates still died, of course, the crematoria worked 24x7 and they had to build a bigger one. The difference was that they were worked to death rather than being gassed on arrival. Given how hideous daily survival was it might be debatable which fate was worse.
Toward the end overcrowding made the camp even more inhumane, resulting from the influx from other camps evacuated ahead of the advancing Allies on the eastern and western fronts. A camp designed to house around six or seven thousand housed around sixty-seven thousand at liberation. Thousands died on the overcrowded death trains that brought them to Dachau. More died in the Typhoid epidemic that swept through the overcrowded camp.
Toward the end of the war a gas chamber was installed at Dachau,suggesting that there were plans to turn it into an extermination camp as part of the dying regime’s desperate last-minute attempts to erase the evidence of it’s crimes. It was used but not on the industrial scale envisaged as a shortage of coal in the final days meant that the crematorium could not be fired up to dispose of the remains.
As you can imagine, the site is a sombre place. We visited in heavy rain on a bleak overcast day, which fitted right in with the mood. Visitors are allowed to take photos but it felt wrong to snap away. The photo at the top of this diary is from the memorial site.
The gas chambers, disguised as showers, are a chilling place to experience, as are the “death rooms” beyond where the corpses were piled to await space in the overworked crematorium. Russian prisoners of war were forced to operate these facilities. They were executed and replaced when physical and psychological exhaustion rendered them incapable of performing the job, typically every a few weeks.
We also saw the remnants of the camp border fences; an eight meter grass strip – the kill zone — any prisoner stepping on this was to be shot and killed immediately and without warning by the watchtower guards, followed by a ditch, three meters wide and two meters deep,followed by a short steep upward slope entangled in barbed wire and leading to a wire fence about four meters in height. The fence was electrified at 380 volts – a voltage chosen to incapacitate quickly but kill slowly. No-one escaped Dachau over the fence. At least, not while the system was functioning properly. Toward the end when the allies were nearby and the fence was no-longer electrified several brave souls managed to escape over it to find the allies and bring them to liberate the camp before the inmates were slaughtered by the fleeing SS guards.
Only the foundations remain of most of the thirty-four barrack blocks. In the difficult post-war years the camp had to be put to a number of humanitarian uses and by the time that it was no longer needed, in the1960s, the original barrack buildings were derelict. Two of them have since been reconstructed from the original plans and the recollections of ex-inmates and ex-staff. They were not nice places; bare, cramped, uninsulated and unheated against hot summers and freezing winters. Fifty-four inmates slept on the floor of each small room, subject to punitive discipline – any trivial infraction would get you an hour of ‘drop-pole hanging’, a nauseatingly sadistic form of punishment in routine use within the camp.
Initially the camp was ‘only’ an interment camp for political prisoners. The purpose darkened rapidly as the regime got into it’s stride. The intake widened as the war progressed to include Jews,dissident intellectuals, dissident clergy and laity, trade unionists, Russian prisoners of war, homosexuals, “race defilers” (those, such as my wife and I, guilty of mixed-race relationships) and any and every other group that the authorities hated, feared or had no use for.
Basically, everyone who frequents this site would have been in there,or some other camp, for one reason or another.
The resonance with today didn’t escape the group we toured with. Most of them were American and you could tell we were all thinking the same thing; this is no-longer just history, no longer just an impossible blasphemy safely caged in the past.
The camp was liberated in 1945 by American forces. It required the combined efforts of the civilized world brought to bear against a single relatively small country to achieve that liberation. If we fall into darkness, who will there be to liberate us?
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* The entrance gate today is a copy, made after the original was stolen. The original was eventually found abandoned in a field in Sweden and returned. It now stands in the Dachau museum. Someone somewhere presumably knows why the took it, but they’re not telling.