Dachau - The First Concentration Camp

This won’t be my typical entry, today we went to the concentration camp by Dachau, Germany near Munich. I don’t think anything I elaborate on will be too graphic, but I guess just be forewarned. A lot the information I’m sharing could be wrong because it is based off my memory of the trip today…if you want to check on anything I’m sure you could just visit Wikipedia.

A video at the Dachau museum immediately put things into perspective; the prisoners had to give up three things upon entering the gates of Dachau: their personal property, their rights, and their human dignity...they were now simply a number.. A member of the United States Army who liberated Dachau had a recording on the supplemental audio tour we purchased for 2 euros and probably described it best: like another planet, somewhere not on this earth. He reiterated over and over how unbelievable a place it was, “indescribably horrible”. Even though the troops had been told the terrible nature of the situation there many times before arriving, this man said before he got there that there was still a smidgen of doubt because he couldn’t believe that one human could treat another in this way.

There’s much about Dachau that I didn’t know coming into today, along with many misconceptions as well. I knew it was the first concentration camp, but basically just thought of it like all the other concentration camps you typically read about in school like Auschwitz. Dachau was basically a test camp, and became the model for the Nazi concentration camps. It was chosen because it was located close to Munich where the Nazi party was based out of. At Dachau there was a munitions factory that was shut down after WWI following the Treaty of Versailles. This large empty facility provided, that could be accessed by train provided an ideal location for the first concentration camp. I learned of the three different stages of concentration camps, as well as the great number of camps: 22 major camps and over 1600 concentration camps in all. The goal of the first stage of camps that started in 1933 with Dachau, was to imprison important political and religious figures in order to eliminate the opposition and their voice. The second stage of camps that began around 1938, increased the number of prisoners and placed them in slave-labor manufacturing positions in order to support the Nazi war effort. Then the final stage was implemented during WWII, these were the death camps like Auschwitz.

I pause to apologize if this is a little boring and somewhat like going back to school, but I did find all of this very interesting.

Many pieces of legislation in the early 1930s leading up to the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 allowed Germany to strip anyone of their civil rights and imprison people without trial. Even German-Jews, who considered themselves Germans before Jews, who had devoted years of service to Germany in WWI were stripped of their citizenship. This made it clear how the Nazis were able to enforce their will in Germany so easily. Even The idea of a concentration camp was conveyed to the public as “protective custody,” in order to avoid speculation of the extreme wrong doing in these camps. The prisoners were given one of 6 classifications, using different colored triangles sewn to their clothing, from political figure to asocial; anyone that didn’t fall in the Nazi ideal was sent to the camps. There were different levels of prisoner types, first offender, second offender (this label let the guards know to treat these prisoners harsher) and even execution by labor; prisoners with this label (a circle as opposed to a triangle) were worked at a grueling pace until they simply died.

Apparently the entire city of Dachau, along with Munich, was entirely oblivious, perhaps naïve, or just turned a blind eye to the whole situation. Some of the testimonials of the soldiers, along with a British woman who came as a journalist, said you could smell death in the air….literally the smell of burnt human flesh. At times, the pile of bodies outside the crematory would grow so much that it would just sit their for days. As a result they even built a second crematory for disposing of the dead.

April 30, 1945 was the day when Dachau was finally liberated. Obviously a time of celebration…however a difficult time for the survivors who had been stripped of their property, rights, and human dignity to know how to move on and regain their sense of being. This was a sobering experience, definitely one I don’t think Erica and I will be able to forget. I’m definitely glad we decided to spend the short time we had in Munich at the camp in Dachau.