An Unexpected Journey to Bavaria: Starting With Our Visit to Dachau

Julie was asked to attend a conference 3 November-6 November held at the Edelweiss Lodge located in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  To take advantage of this wonderful opportunity, we drove to Garmisch-Partenkirchen the Friday before the conference - giving us a full weekend to visit explore Bavaria.  We got off to a later start than hoped for, of which I was reprimanded for my tardiness.  We would pay dearly with a five-hour drive full of Stau - heavy traffic.  We stopped once for gas and dinner at a rest stop about an hour away from our the hotel.  Not entirely unrelated, but worth noting - gas station food throughout Germany is excellent, sandwiches and pastries alike.

We checked-in at the front desk shortly after 21:00, but our room had twin beds and a shared balcony on the second-floor rooftop terrace.  We called the front desk to see if there was a room available with a king bed - even if we had to change rooms with an influx of people attending the conference.  As it turns out, they had one room left, in addition - it had what was described as a "favorable view."  We settled into our new room and made plans for our first day in Bavaria.  We planned to visit the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial and would end our day on a lighter note with beers and over-sized pretzels at the Hofbräuhaus in München.

The following morning we drove north to Dachau, unfortunately a town that will forever be synonymous with the concentration camp.  The Memorial site is free to visit, or, for a small price one can join a guided tour (offered in English, Italian, and German).  We arrived early, but the tour began within a half-hour of our arrival.

Entrance, "ARBEIT MACHT FREI"

Main grounds

Work sets you free

The historical beginning of Dachau Konzentrationslager (KZ) is most devious - the concentration camp was opened in March 1933 on the site of an old munition manufacturing plant.  The timing of the the internment camp's inception and the rise of the Nazi regime is quite interesting.  Hitler became the Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and four-weeks later an arson set the Reichstag building ablaze.  The fire was the catalyst Hitler used to create the conspiracy that the Communist Party (of Germany) was attempting to usurp his power.  A month later, Dachau opened as a place to hold all political adversaries.  Also, being the first of its kind, it served as the model for all future concentration camps.

Area near Crematorium

Watch tower, gap, slope covered in broken glass and electric fence

Barbed wire

The KZ largely held political prisoners until 1935, the year the Nuremberg Laws were enacted.  The new law allowed the persecution of the Jewish community (and non-Aryans) - greatly increasing the population of concentration camps.  The scope of those imprisoned was not limited to political prisoners and Jewish citizens - other sects discriminated and detained included; Jehovah's Witnesses, gypsies, homosexuals, and emigrants.

Internee's quarters

Area near execution firing-wall

With the large prison population, internees were labeled with a colored caste system using triangle patches.  The following colors were used to identify detainees; red (Political Prisoner), blue (Foreign Emigrants for forced labor), purple (Jehovah's Witnesses), pink (Homosexuals), brown (Gypsies), and yellow (Jewish).  These markings could be fashioned in a way that two triangles could be worn to mock the the Star of David - used to identify captives of both Jewish decent and an aforementioned group.

Memorial representing the patches given to prisoners

Memorial representing those who chose death in the electric and barbed wire fences over life at Dachau

There were no extermination camps in Germany during the Third Reich, but this isn't to say the conditions at Dachau were any less grotesque.  Thousands of prisoners were executed, tortured, subjected to inhumane working conditions, and/or suffered from heinous human experiments.  Known as a labor camp - the entrance gate read, "Arbeit macht frei," the English translation, "work sets you free."   Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the Schutzstaffel (SS) supervised Dachau, and in 1937, internees were forced to construct new buildings to hold the increasing prison population, with an approximate capacity of 6,000.

"Old" Crematorium - 1940

By 1943, approximately 11,000 bodies were cremated here

"New" Crematorium

"New" Crematorium and Gas Chamber

 A year later, the notorious November pogrom, Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) sent an additional 11,000 German and Austrian Jews to Dachau and its ancillary camps.  In 1940, the (old) crematorium was constructed due to the high mortality rate of prisoners.  Within a year, the operation was beyond capacity and a larger crematorium was built (1942/43), completed with a gas chamber.  Though, mass executions were not held in the new facility, it was still used to execute and murder individuals.  As the war progressed, a ghastly number of detainees were held in Dachau - a total reaching over 63,000 by 1944.  It wasn't until the spring of 1945 when American forces liberated the concentration camp.  In the twelve year history of Dachau, 32,000 deaths were documented and it is unknown how many thousands more deaths went unaccounted.

"Waiting Room" area for instruction on usage of "showers"

Entrance into "showers"

Gas chamber, in 15 minutes, 150 people could be murdered using prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B)

It is a requirement that all German students (in Bavaria, unsure about Germany as a whole) visit a concentration camp as part of their curriculum - a way of confronting the past in order to instill a better future.  However, there are times when hate and ignorance pervert civil society.  The same night of our visit to Dachau, the "Arbeit macht frei" gate was stolen by a group of depraved vandals - a putrid example of human behavior that continues to be unresolved.  

Exiting Memorial site, the last day this gate stood at Dachau Konzentrationslager (KZ)