Anyway, last thing I wrote about in April was the Tuesday of the week that Brad came to visit. On Wednesday, April 24th, I decided to take Brad to the concentration camp in Dachau. I had waited for spring, better weather, and company to better temper what I imagined the experience would be like. To be honest, I really had no idea what to expect and still have trouble knowing exactly how to react to something so poignant and yet distant and foreign, to the point of being inaccessible. I was never overwhelmed during my visit, quieted and disgusted yes, but my reaction was primarily contained in intellect, in a neutral and callous response to very comprehensive memorial to the victims of such immense and apparent atrocity. It’s so hard for me to fully convey because it’s so hard for me to understand or relate. Hmmm.
Dachau, the city, was at one time a lively artsy-type town just a little outside a cultural center. That was in the 1800’s. Now it’s one of Munich’s most affordable suburbs. The concentrating happened somewhere in between.
The Dachau Concentration Camp was the first camp established by the Nazi’s for their political and domestic prisoners. It started out as a prison/work camp and was shown to the world as an example of how productive Nazi society could be and how well they treated their prisoners. This, of course, was simply a show, though the conditions would get much worse. Being a camp on German soil Dachau was never an industrial death plant like Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, or Treblinka but it was the test sight for many of the horrors put into full force in these camps, including gas chambers and crematoriums. Dachau was also a medical research facility, where the Nazi’s tried to cure malaria by infecting prisoners and trying different medications to see their effects. In addition to the malaria studies they preformed battlefield survival experiments where they would drown or freeze people to death to see how long a downed airman could survive in the open ocean.
We left Munich early on Wednesday and took the train out to Dachau the town. From Dachau the town we went to Dachau the camp. Besides a bus stop and sign by the road, the entrance to the camp was very modest. The camp is open daily with absolutely no entrance fee.
Here’s the outer fence:
When we got inside we split off to wander on our own. I would recommend tackling something like a concentration camp in this manner as it leaves you free to contemplate things, take things at your own pace, and linger where you personally ought to linger. I’m glad I got the chance to do it that way.
Right inside the wall you see the museum and former processing center for prisoners:
The museum was really good and really detailed, covering not just the history of the camp and the various despicable going-ons therein but also the rise of Nazism in Germany and the climate that allowed it to flourish. I didn’t have enough time to do it justice, but I’d like to go back.
Behind it was the a prison within a prison for those people that acted up or were particularly hated by the Nazi’s. Here:
When the Americans used the camp to hold war criminals after the war, they put windows into the walls of this building to make it a tad more humane; beforehand each room was solitary and pitch-black.
They even had a few standing-only cells, which were cells divided further into 4-6 stalls:
Eerie.
Behind the prison are these poles where, as punishment, prisoners would be hung off the ground by their arms for several hours.
In front of the museum there are a few different pieces of artwork:
Directly in front of that once stood row after row of prisoner barracks, of which two have been rebuilt and the rest are nothing but foundations. Here’s a little panorama:
Inside are reconstructed versions of different rooms and different conditions for the barracks. First, the original bedroom configuration:
Later on in the war, when the Nazi’s ramped up their Final Solution in order to try and actually finish, the camps were forced to hold something like 10 times their normal capacity. The barracks had to too:
After the long rows of barracks stood three different memorial chapels: one Protestant, one Catholic and one Jewish.
This is the Jewish one:
The text translates to: "Send them a warning, oh Eternal One, that they may know that they are mortal!" There's a verse reference at the end there to Psalm 9:21, but I think it's actually Psalm 9:20, since there is no verse 21.
The sign says: "Over 6 Million Jews fell prey to the National-Socialist Regime".
This was in the Protestant one:
It translates to: “Refuge is found in the shadow of your wings."
I apparently didn’t take a picture of the Catholic one. Hmmm.
I do think it would be interesting to go to a service at the Protestant Chapel there one Sunday, just to see what it’s like.
A monastery was built, attached to the camp, directly behind the Catholic chapel:
At the bottom corner of the camp there is a bridge leading to the crematorium. As you cross the bridge you can see the trenches dug in front of the barbed wire to help prevent prisoners from escaping. If anyone were to run into the ditch they were shot immediately. Many people died in these trenches trying to escape the camp, many people just ran into them to die faster.
Before the crematorium area were several memorials:
"Remember how we died here."
"To the dead, honor.
Let the living be a warning to the future."
This is the main crematorium building, where bodies were burned:
Attached to the crematorium is one of the first Nazi gas chambers and only authentic chamber saved after the war. Gas chambers elsewhere were dismantled by the Nazi’s in attempts to hide what they had been doing or simply demolished by American forces after camps take-over. At Dachau the prisoners insisted that the chamber remain, as a testament that would last longer than they could.
The chamber was disguised as a shower:
This is inside:
I ended up sitting in there for a little while, trying to make sense of what I was seeing and trying to know what to feel.
Behind the crematorium was a path that led through a small patch of forest full of ash pits and memorials to the thousands of unknown dead:
Also in these woods was a wall used during firing squad executions:
It's all covered in foliage, as you can see, but at the bottom is a trough that once collected blood.
On the other side of the crematorium from the woods stands a Russian Orthodox chapel:
And that is Dachau.
Overall, I thought the memorial was really well put together and really respectful. It maintains a certain solemnity while catering to a wide range of visitors and tourists, never sinking to exploiting these visitors. The only things you have to pay for are things to help you better understand what happened there, like books or tours. It is otherwise free and open. I also really appreciated the amount of information on signs and such available all over the camp to explain things. Really really good.
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After Dachau we took the time to unwind and spend time with some of the JYMers. A group of maybe ten or fifteen people decided to hang out in Sam’s room that evening, which was really nice.
This you might enjoy: Blane fell asleep for a bit on Sam’s bed and we had the delightful idea to paint him. He woke up at one point but let us continue. Here he is:
That’s it for Wednesday!
