GERMANY: DACHAU

 May 25, 2025

We visited Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria in 2012 and Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp in Poland in 2019, so we assumed we were more or less prepared for a visit to Dachau. However, I learned that you can't actually be "prepared" to face horror on the scale of a concentration camp.

Historians believe over 1.1 million people perished in Auschwitz during its less than five years of existence, and 90,000 to 120,000 people were killed or died from the horrific conditions at Mauthausen during its seven years of operation. In contrast, "only" 41,500 or so people died in the Dachau concentration camp and its extensive subcamp system, and that was over a period of twelve years. Auschwitz-Birkenau existed primarily as an extermination center--the "final solution to the Jewish problem." Mauthausen started as a labor camp, but eventually became an extermination center as well. Dachau was a prison camp--a place in the beginning for the Nazis to intern their political opponents; then groups regarded as criminals such as Jews, Romani, homosexuals, and Jehovah's Witnesses; and finally, foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded.

We arrived in the city of Dachau by train, and I was kind of surprised that there was a city--I had only heard of the camp. A map at the station highlights "Historic Old Town," "Dachau Palace," and  ways to experience nature near the town of 50,000. The last thing on the list is a "Place of Learning and Commemoration"--the concentration camp.

We had a private guide who showed us a map of the major concentration camps in Germany itself--most of which I hadn't heard of--along with the subcamps and Aktion T-4 centers. There are so many.

Grafeneck, where our grandfather was murdered on May 21, 1940, is on the map.

It was gloomy and rainy at Dachau, appropriate weather for the experience.

The Dachau concentration camp was opened by Heinrich Himmler in 1933, the first concentration camp established by the Nazi Party and the longest to be in operation, from March 1933 to April 1945 when it was liberated by American forces.

The main guardhouse served as the entrance to the camp. According to information on site, prisoners were often harassed and beaten on the march from the Dachau railway station to the camp grounds and as they entered this portal to begin (or continue, for some who had been captive for a while) a nightmarish life.  

Many years before the same phrase was used at Auschwitz, Dachau's entrance was crowned with the motto Arbeit macht frei ("Work will make you free").

As I mentioned earlier, Dachau was a prison camp, but it was also a forced labor camp. Several of the factory buildings still exist. During the war these buildings held a work places such as a bakery, a saddle shop, a shoemaking shop, a uniform tailoring shop, a butcher's shop, a metalworking shop, and a munitions factory.

Before we went into the museum, we took note of this huge assembly area:

Prisoners came here for roll call, regardless of the weather, and were often left standing for hours under the baking sun or in frigid temperatures.

We noted what appeared to be a free-standing wall in the courtyard.

But on closer examination, we saw it was a memorial with these words in French, English, German, and Russian: "May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men."

We were happy to get out of the rain and go inside to explore the vast museum, which I believe was originally the maintenance building constructed by the prisoners themselves in 1937-1938. It contained the kitchen, supply room, baths, laundry, and workshops. It also included the registration room where new prisoners experienced the degrading intake process.

The chart on left shows what was happening in world trade from 1929 to 1933 and on right the poster says "Our last hope: Hitler." The graph below the poster shows the rising unemployment in the German Reich between 1921-1933. Conditions were ripe for Hitler's rise.

This map shows the countries of origin of Dachau's prisoners between 1933-1945. The largest number came from Poland (40,395), then Germany itself (31,456), then the Soviet Union (25,113), and then Hungary (21,124).

The camp began, as I noted earlier, as a prison and labor camp, but as the war escalated, so did the number of deaths at Dachau.

Prisoners were given badges that indicated what their "crime" was. The top line of six triangles of different colors includes political party, professional criminal, emigrant, Bible researcher (Jehovah's Witnesses), homosexual, and antisocial.  Additional shapes/pieces were added for various purposes, including being Jewish.

The admissions process took place in this part of the building. 

Prisoners were stripped of all their clothing, had their heads shaved, were disinfected, and showered, after which they donned their prisoner uniforms. If they were deemed unfit for work, they were transported to the Hartheim Castle near Linz, about l60 miles away, where they were murdered.

One of the horrible punishments at Dachau also occurred in this room: pole hanging. Prisoners who were deemed unruly or whom a guard just didn't like had their hands tied behind their back and were hung by their wrists from a ceiling beam and beaten by guards. This was also a method used for questioning.

The "plantation," a large garden, was one of the most dreaded labor assignments. It was hard physical labor under all weather conditions, and there was insufficient food and clothing and constant harrassment.

Nazi officials often dropped by for a tour of the facility.

General health conditions were horrific.

Emaciated prisoners on the day of release:

When we went outside to cross the large open area to see the prisoner barracks, we saw this sculpture, which at first glance seemed to be abstract chaos. 

But we quickly realized it is a pile of skeletons or bodies in the agony of death. It is entitled Monument to the Fallen Victims.

A side view shows the upright metal bars representing the fencing around the camp.

When I looked at my 2012 post on Mauthausen, I found a similar sculpture:

It turns out they were both created by the same Yugoslav sculptor, Nandor Glid, a Holocaust survivor who lost most of his family at Auschwitz.  

We were also very moved by this sculpture, a kind of "Tomb of the Unknown Soldier," although this is the "Ashes of an Unknown Concentration Camp Inmate." On the wall are the words "Never again" in Hebrew, French, English, German, and Russian.

Remember that chart in the museum that showed the different colored triangles that identified different kinds of prisoners? I don't know what the significance of the three joined ovals is in the sculpture below, but the same shapes and colors that are on the chart we saw inside decorate the ovals.

Time to move on to the barracks, which were demolished at the end of the war. However, a sample barracks was reconstructed as part of the museum in 1965.

During the war, there were dozens of rows of barracks . . . 

. . . which are indicated by gravel strips and numbers today.

Until 1937, prisoners were housed in a building divided into five rooms with tri-level bunk beds and had their own bed and a seat at the table. But even then they froze during the winter and had insufficient bathroom facilities.

Gradually, more prisoners came to Dachau, and more barracks were built, but the supply could not keep up with the demand. Barracks intended for 250 people housed as many as 1,600 prisoners each. Eventually as many as four or five people wedged together like sardines shared one bunk.

These beds don't look very comfortable, even with the straw mattresses that prisoners may have had.

My family  members contemplating the camp's living conditions:

The number of prisoners in the camp rose to around 30,000 in late 1944, and barracks were unbelievably crowded . . .

. . . but the number of toilets stayed the same.

A few other memorials stand at the far end of the camp. This is the Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel, built under the guidance of a Dachau survivor who became the auxiliary bishop of Munich. It was consecrated in 1960. Above the entrance is an iron crown of thorns. Symbolically, the chapel represents the liberation from captivity through Christ, and the bell in the blue tower on the left is rung every day at 3:00 p.m., the hour of Jesus' death as stated in the Bible.

A Jewish Memorial is nearby. This architecture is also symbolic. Like a ramp, a path leads to the structure's interior. Inside, a band of light marble points to an opening in the roof where a menorah stands as a symbol of light overcoming darkness. The site was opened in 1967.

The perimeter fence, partly reconstructed in 1965, was designed to make escape impossible. SS men were positioned in the seven watchtowers around the perimeter, and the instant a prisoner entered the 10-foot-wide prohibited zone, he was shot.

In 1994, the Russian Orthodox Church in Moscow and Germany and the Russian Embassy collaborated on this Russian Orthodox Chapel to commemorate the Soviet prisoners of war who lost their lives in the Dachau concentration camp. It was built by members of the Russian armed forces in 1994-1995.

And now we get to the crematorium. Outside the building is this heartrending statue of a Dachau prisoner with the inscription on the base that reads: "In honor of the dead, as a warning to the living."

Another memorial nearby is a stone table engraved with the German words for "They died for freedom, justice, and honor."

The large crematorium was erected between May 1942 and April 1943 with a dual purpose: as a killing facility and to deal with the bodies of the dead. While a gas chamber was part of the complex, survivors have testified that it was never used for mass murder, although the SS did murder individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas.

One of the most disturbing images on display at the camp shows the dead bodies in front of the building pictured above at the end of April/beginning of May 1945. The photo must have been taken by the U.S. liberating forces, who arrived on April 29th, 1945, and found approximately 3,000 dead in the camp.

The photo below left is a room where prisoners waited for their turn to shower or perhaps disrobed, and  on the right is one of the "disinfecting" shower rooms. During a period of 15-20 minutes, up to 150 people could be killed in that room with the poison gas Zyklon B, although as noted earlier, starvation, disease, and beating appear to have been the preferred methods of murder at Dachau.

Though I have seen Nazi crematoria before, looking into these open mouths still causes a visceral response of nausea, fear, and horror. Tens of thousands of bodies were literally shoveled into those firepits as if they were pieces of wood rather than human beings. That the Nazis could so easily and so impassively cover up their massive crimes is hard to comprehend. In addition, many hangings were carried out directly in front of the burning ovens. 

Besides hanging, many inmates were shot. For example, on September 12, 1944, four female British officers who had been involved with the Resistance in France were shot execution style at Dachau and then cremated. They are remembered with a plaque in the crematorium. I looked up their names and discovered they have very interesting stories.

Just outside is lush green forest and beautiful, peaceful pathways that are a surreal contrast to the crematorium.

But nestled among the greenery are reminders of what this place really was.

There are also markers in German and English for mass graves and "ash graves."

The last room we went into held hundreds of memorial plaques and artworks honoring the victims of Dachau specifically and of the Nazi regime in general.

The Austrian-American psychologist Bruno Bettelheim was a prisoner in Dachau and then Buchenwald for 10 1/2 months before being released in 1939 when amnesty was declared for hundreds of prisoners in honor of Hitler's birthday.

A sampling of memoirs of prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp is on display:

On April 26th, three days before liberation, SS guards forced approximately 7,000 prisoners on a "death march" towards the Alps. They passed through several Bavarian villages, which explains the caption on this sculpture: "In the final days of the war in April 1945, the suffering procession of prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp passed through here on their way to an uncertain fate."

Hundreds of prisoners died along the route. Months later, a mass grave filled with 1,071 bodies was discovered along the route. A few days after the liberation of Dachau, American forces discovered and aided hundreds of the dying marchers 50 miles away from the camp.

On April 29th, 1945, two infantry divisions of the United States Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp. 

The army and the International Prisoner Committee were faced with the task of caring for and repatriating more than 30,000 survivors. Among many issues they had to deal with were a typhus epidemic in the camp and bodies that needed to be buried (not cremated). 

Separate camps were set up for Jewish survivors who had lost most of their family members and had no home or work to return to.

The U.S. Army also forced the residents of the city of Dachau to view the crematorium and piles of bodies, and members of the Nazi party had to assist in burying the dead.

In 1955, the former prisoners of Dachau created an organization to fight for the founding of a memorial site at the camp. A museum, an archive, and a library finally opened in 1965, the first and for many years the only one of its kind in the Federal Republic of Germany.