Dachau - powerful

Today I went to the concentration camp Dachau just north of Munich. Dachau is situated at the north end of the town, with neighborhoods to the south and west and farmland to the east that the prisoners of Dachau cultivated. A clear, fast flowing canal marks the western boundary of the prison camp and separates the SS compound from the prison camp. Trees line the prison walls, which were fortified with barbed wire and ditches. Prisoners were shot if they got near the walls.




Dachau was the longest operating concentration camp, open from 1933-1945. The camp held all sorts of prisoners - Jews, Catholic priests who spoke out against SS policies, conscientious objectors, gypsies - from several different countries including Poland, Germany, Austria, Italy, and the Soviet Union. There was also a jail on the premises for prisoners who misbehaved or even SS members or other "special" prisoners of war.


Although Dachau wasn't a mass murder camp, they did send prisoners who were "invalids" to nearby "extermination" camps. Dachau itself had a gas chamber that supposedly wasn't used for mass murders, just occasionally for smaller groups. Several tens of thousands of people died there, however, due to medical experimentation, overworking, squalid conditions, executions, etc. Dachau had to build a second incineration building to accommodate all the dead bodies, and memorials now stand in the places where the ashes were dumped.


Now the camp exists as a museum and people can take a tour of the whole facility, where the prisoner barracks were recreated and four religious monuments have been established to honor all those who died there. A Carmelite convent also exists where the nuns spend part of their days praying for those who were held in Dachau.



It was very moving walking across the roll call yard where thousands of prisoners were forced to line up every morning and get their orders for their days work. The contrast between Dachau's beautiful surroundings - the canal, the leaves changing color, the quiet town - and the horrible thought of what humans did to each other here was overwhelmingly powerful.