Dachau Concentration Camp - Munich
July 6

In a suburb, just 15 miles from downtown Munich, the first Nazi concentration camp opened in 1933, just months after Hitler became Reich Chancellor. KZ Dachau (konzentrationslager) at first it held a few hundred political prisoners; vocal opponents of the party, communists, and real criminals. Prisoners were even released after their sentence was up. Soon after though, it was rebuilt completely to hold 7,000 prisoners in fairly comfortable conditions but that's when the brutality started in earnest.

After Reichkristallnacht, in November 1938, about 10,000 Jews were brought from all over Bavaria to Dachau while their property was being given to party regulars and their friends. Most of them were released a few weeks later.

Once the war efforts of Germany intensified the prisoners at Dachau were farmed out to work in production plants and this scheme continued until the very end of the war. The video calls it "slave labor", pulling no punches. Other concentration camps were set up around Germany on the Dachau model and hundreds of satellite camps held laborers on loan from these camps. Some Jewish ghettos were transformed into full concentration camps.

After 1939, camps were also set up in France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Poland, Austria, and Czechoslovakia. Some of these camps were in actuality extermination camps where, at first, sick prisoners from other camps were sent to relieve overcrowding. There were no gas chambers at Dachau although the crematorium was so overpressed at the end they ran out of coal and couldn't burn bodies anymore, opening mass graves. You know the whole terrible story of course.

A visit to a concentration camp should be mandatory for every world leader.


"Work will make you free"

The gate above is located just to the west of the maintenance building (above it in the model below). The gate with it's famous message swings free and Bob closed it (almost shut) for a moment to take that picture.

The area bounded in white below was the SS offices and barracks. The lower area was the actual camp. There were 34 prisoners' barracks in two rows and a U-shaped "maintenance" building at the south end. One SS building, the main gate, and the maintenance building, another prison/interrogation building, and some of the guard towers are the only structures still standing. A memorial museum occupies the entire maintenance building.

People are now living and working in the SS area and just yards from the camp fences.


Sub-camps in the Munich area.


Entrance building from the inside.

Two barracks building have been reconstructed for display purposes. They were torn down in the 1950s after the facility stopped being used as a refugee camp - which went on longer than the war. Go figure.

Two rows of poplar trees grew down the central aisle. They were planted when the camp was first opened.


Besides 3 small religious memorials at the north end of the camp,
the only other new structure is a tough sculpture.

Displays in the memorial include

Christof Knoll spent 11 years in Dachau for being a communist. He headed the prisoner agricultural work force in the "plantation" in 1928-39. He was feared for his brutality and violence. Knoll was sentenced to death in the Dachau trial and executed in May, 1946."

Adolf Maislinger, a communist, spent 6 years in Dachau as the prisoner boss of the disinfection unit. He "was able to hide and protect prisoners there. Prisoners were able to hide a radio there and used it to obtain informaiton about the war. Maislinger was regarded highly by other prisinoers." He was a tour guide after the camp became a memorial site until his death in 1985.

There is no entry fee and the Wednesday we were there a dozen tour buses brought mostly high school students who were pretty respectful. 3-hour guided tours are available in a half-dozen languages. We ended up spending 5 hours just looking at the displays (all written in German and English).

Near the end of the war, prisoners from other camps were shuttled to the center of Germany as Allied troops advanced from the east, north, and west. Dachau, built to hold 7,000 had over 60,000 at the end. Over 7,500 people died from starvation and typhus in the last few months before liberation and another 1,000 died afterwards.

The end came too slowly. On April 24th evacuations of sensitive prisoners began by the SS. Thousands were marched south toward Austria and most died within days of forced march.

One prisoner escaped on April 26th and found American troops to tell about Dachau. The next day a Red Cross official came to the camp. On the 28th, a resistance unit in town fought with camp guards and were massacred. And on the 29th, American forces reached the camp. The Red Cross representative had previously set up surrender terms with the only officer left in the camp but 34 SS men were shot - half in the morning when 17 came across approaching troops and opened fire, half when shots came from a guard tower minutes after the liberating troops entered the camp.

Another hundred or so guards and prisoners were killed by prisoners on the day of liberation. Due to the typhoid epidemic, the Americans actually quarantined the camp, replaced the SS guards, and prevented any prisoners from leaving for weeks.

All in all, over 200,000 people passed through Dachau and more than 43,000 of them died there. This figure includes possibly 25,000 Russian POWs where were sent to Dachau during the war and immediately shot in a field a few miles away. Prisoners from satellite work sites were sent back to die when they were too sick or starved to work. There were no real medical facilities at all after 1939.

After the war, almost 25,000 German prisoners were held at Dachau awaiting trials. Most were never tried and only a handful were ever punished. The workload and backlog was so great, only capital crimes were actually prosecuted.

Later, as mentioned earlier, the barracks were used as a refugee camp. Conditions were of course bearable - at least more bathing facilities added. But in the end the refugees staged a well-publicized hunger strike to get the camp shut down.

We know this page might have been hard for you to read. We tried to keep it as light as possible and there are some pictures we don't want to publish. Back at our hotel that evening, CNN International did a report on Guantanamo Bay. It sickened us all over again.