Dachau

I took the Gray Line / MV-Touristik Dachau Memorial Tour today for €21, including the cost of the public transportation we took, which was probably a little less than half of the tour price.

My guide was Levi, originally from a remote part of Wisconsin far from even Green Bay, he settled in Munich with his wife about two years ago. Over the course of the tour I became increasingly certain that Levi is ex-Amish. I never asked him, but here are my reasons:

1. He shied away from one of the people in my group who was from Illinois and who had relatives in Wisconsin - the person kept trying to press Levi about exactly where his hometown is. He never did actually answer. 

2. He mentioned that he had already known quite a bit of German when he had first toured Europe before eventually coming back and settling here. I know he's from a very German area of the States, but...

3.  He speaks English with a strong trace of an unusual accent that's not Midwestern. And, despite being an American and having a group composed almost entirely of North American native English speakers, he rarely used any modern colloquial expressions. 

4. His name is Levi. 

Based on these and other, more subtle clues I have deduced that he fell in love with another lifestyle when on his Rumspringa, and maybe with his wife, too.  Don't know if she was Amish, but I'm pretty sure he was. 

In any event, we left the Marienplatz for our five hour tour, which actually took longer because we had a huge group - 36 people - which made, for instance, getting on the public bus from the Dachau train station to the Camp pretty challenging. 

Roughly translated, "Work will set you Free." the main gate of the Dachau Concentration Camp. 

The Dachau Concentration Camp wasn't the deadliest of the camps, per se.  But it was the first, set up less than two months after Hitler assumed power in 1933. Yes, years before WWII began. It was set up near Munich in an abandoned munitions complex for expediency - there were already buildings, a fence, and a nearby railway. Why near Munich? Hitler had many political foes in Bavaria and he had them all rounded up and sent to the camp for hard labor. 

  

Dachau was also the training center for the SS; there were extensive grounds surrounding the camp that were used for that purpose, and the camp itself was also part of the training; as the first camp, officers and guards for the others were sent here for indoctrination and training. 

At first there weren't too many deaths in Dachau - it wasn't set up as an extermination camp like Auchwitz, for example. The dead were sent into the town of Dachau for cremation. Eventually, however, as the population in the camp grew (religious and political figures, Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies, drunkards and other "undesirables") the deaths increased, and they increased disproportionately because the guards were taught to be cruel, and the total ration for food for the camp didn't increase to meet the higher population - nor did the number of buildings in which to house the prisoners. Buildings that originally housed 50 prisoners snugly were overpopulated to the point where some barracks held nearly 3,000. Russian POWs, during the war itself, were simply executed after being brought to Dachau. 

The Nazis built their own crematorium at the camp to hide the number of dead prisoners from the inhabitants of the sleepy town of Dachau. Deaths continued to rise and the crematorium couldn't handle the volume, so a second, much larger crematorium was built. 

 

 

Above, left: the original crematorium and its oven. 

Above, right: the new crematorium and one set of its higher efficiency ovens. 

The new crematorium also had a gas chamber, though it was primarily used for training and experimentation, and not for large-scale murder. Still, too many innocents were put to death in its walls. 

 

Left: the entrance to the "Brausebad" - the showers. Germans rarely use that word today because of its singularly negative connotation. Instead they use Doucher, taken from the French. Right, inside the gas chamber with the "shower heads" removed. 

It was here in Dachau that Zyklon-B, a disinfectant and pesticide, was determined to be effective to suffocate and kill humans in the gas chamber in high concentrations and with hot air pumped in. This chemical was then widely used in the extermination camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe. There weren't any extermination camps inside Germany itself, so Hitler could try to hide their existence from his countrymen. Certainly known by the German people, however, were the labor camps. In all, there were actually around 1500 Nazi concentration camps.  

Each of the replica foundations represents one of the the 40 or so barracks at Dachau. The original buildings were cheaply constructed to begin with, and were torn down after the War - and after the camp was put to use as a refugee center after the war, and as a U.S. military base after that. The Memorial Site has rebuilt two of the barracks, in which to show the living conditions faced by the inmates. The original gatehouse remains, as do the original headquarters building and "VIP" cell block. 

 

Above, left: part of the induction area in the administration building, where prisoners were stripped of their clothing, shaven from head to toe, and given prisoner uniforms. Neither the prisoners, nor even the guards, were allowed to smoke. Above, right: a long line of individual prisoner cells.  These held ranking political foes, clergy, and others who might be useful to the regime in the future. A few of the cells were split into four smaller cells, measuring about 2.5 feet on a side - the intent being that the prisoner being punished couldn't really sit or slouch for the 2-3 days of his punishment in the cell. 

In all, of the 202,000+ incarcerated at Dachau over its 12 years in operation, roughly 33,000 never left alive. And this wasn't one of the purpose-built extermination camps. 

Dachau, Bavaria, Germany.