Dachau Concentration Camp

We returned from our trip to Garmisch Monday evening, but I've been having complications with my blog and was unable to post. I believe the bugs have been worked out, so here we go again.

We planned on visiting Eagle's Nest with the USO tour, but on Friday they called saying the trip had been canceled because enough people had not signed up for it. So, instead of staying at home we decided to do the trip on our own. The funny thing is - we never made it to Eagle's Nest, but had a lot of fun other places.

We planned on leaving very early Sunday morning and driving to Dachau to tour the concentration camp when it opened, then driving on down to Garmisch to spend the night at Edelweiss Resort. We didn't get out quite as early as we wanted because we were woke up at 2:00am by Sam's bother, Stefan, calling from Japan. They never remember the time difference, so it ended up being the middle of the night for us. After such calls, Sam always says he's going to return the favor some day :)

We were on the road around 9:00am and drove to Dachau. Amazingly, we didn't get too lost, so we were parked and walking in around 11:15. It's really odd to be in a place, like Dachau, where there is so much negative history associated with it. We found it really strange that there were houses built just feet from the concentration camp walls (see picture at left). I can't imagine living that close to a place where such atrocities happened. The prison area was very large, but I read it was built for about 10,000 and ended up housing 63,000, so I can only imagine how crowded it must have been. It's not easy looking at all the pictures displayed and reading about the prisoners, but I feel it's important to see that part of history. Visiting a place such as Dachau is not really a fun trip, but more informative and historic.

Dachau was the first regular concentration camp established by the Nazi government. I believe most of the Jewish prisoners were transported to the other concentration camps, however, about one third of the Dachau prisoners were Jewish. Many of the others were political or religious prisoners. They also used the prisoners here in medical experiments.

This is the entrance to the prison. You can see the phrase that was on the prison gates meaning "Work brings freedom".

The rooms above the prison doors were used as administrative offices

The electric fence that surrounds the concentration camp and a guard tower.

Dachau guard tower

The first building we toured was made up of 137 individual cells. I believe this is where some of the political prisoners and even some German soldier prisoners were housed. There were also some cells that held imprisoned religious figures.

Looking down the hallway with prison cells on each side.

Standing by one of the cell doors

Inside one of the prison cells

This is the roll call area where the prisoners would have to gather each morning to be counted.

There are only a couple of bunkhouses that are still standing and only one of them was open for viewing. Inside we saw the bunk beds that the prisoners slept on (I'm sure not the original beds), the lockers, tables and bathrooms. It had to have been incredibly cramped with about 1,600 people in each of these bunkhouses. The foundations of the other bunkhouses were left in place, so you can see how many there actually were.

The lockers used by the prisoners

The bathroom sinks

The foundations for the bunkhouses that were torn down. They are all numbered.

At the backside of the prison was the crematorium and gas chambers. Set up in a way to make the prisoners think they were going in for a shower only to be killed. From what I read, it doesn't sound like they used the gas chambers at Dachau for mass killings though. I'm not sure if they were ever used for that purpose at this concentration camp.

The crematorium ovens

Well, that was our tour of Dachau. The computer is acting up and not wanting to post pictures, so I'll blog about the rest of our trip in another post. Until then...