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Main entry to Dachau
"Arbeit macht frei" ("Work makes you free"). This is a replica of the original gate now on display inside the camp museum.Today our friend Peter volunteered to drive us about 12 miles northwest of downtown Munich, to the small town of Dachau (pop. 45,000), and site of the infamous Konzentrationslager (KZ) Dachau. Dee and I rode the bus to Rotkreuzplatz, a square in the Neuhausen district not far from his and Rosita's home, where we met him by 9:30 AM.
After 30-minutes of driving we reached the Memorial Site, which is foremost a place of remembrance--a cemetery, but at the same time a museum and place of learning. In addition to a main exhibition on the history of the Dachau camp, which encompasses some 43,000 sq.ft. in various buildings, the Memorial Site offers an extensive educational program, archive and library.
Peter had little difficulty in finding a parking place, and we were surprised by the sparse crowds, although there were many busses transporting groups of German high-school-students on field trips. There are no admission tickets required to visit the site, so we were soon passing through the entry gate into the camp, with its ominous "Arbeit macht frei" inscription. Dachau was primarily a work camp, where prisoners were expected to pay for their "crimes" with slave labor.
The museum
is housed in a former camp maintenance building, one of the few original buildings still standing. We spent the next hour or so walking through a variety of exhibits intended to give an historical perspective on the camp's founding, the political and social climate that gave rise to the Nazi movement and many images of the brutal conditions in the camp.
There is also a 22-minute, B&W documentary film produced back in the 1960s, that provides sobering--and often grisly images--of the rise of Hitler, and the atrocities committed at Dachau and other camps. In the twelve years of its existence, over 200,000 persons from throughout Europe were imprisoned here.
Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps opened in 1933, shortly after Hitler rose to power, and was initially intended to hold political prisoners. Opened by Heinrich Himmler, its purpose was enlarged to include forced labor, and eventually, the imprisonment of Jews, German and Austrian criminals, and eventually foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded. The Dachau camp system grew to include nearly 100 sub-camps, which were mostly work camps located throughout southern Germany and Austria. It served as the prototype for all subsequent concentration
Grisly camp images
Photos displayed in museum exhibits. camps, and as a "training school of violence" for the SS who were assigned to them.
Originally designed to hold 3,000 prisoners, by the end of the war when the camp was liberated by U.S. Army personnel, the prisoner population had swollen to 30,000 crammed into 34 barracks--each prisoner had 1 square yard of living space.
Prisoners lived in constant fear of brutal treatment and terror detention, including standing cells, floggings, the so-called tree or pole hanging, and standing at attention for extremely long periods. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, with untold numbers that have never been documented.
After American troops liberated Dachau in April, 1945, the grounds were used for a variety of purposes. Between 1945-48, the U.S. military imprisoned Nazi officials and members of the SS here, and until the early 1960s the former camp accommodated war refugees and expellees from other areas in Eastern Europe. Today, the Memorial Site is part of the Bavarian Memorial Foundation.
When we had finished the museum tour, Peter and I walked across the grounds to view one of the two former prisoner barracks remaining on the site. Other sights at the far end of
"dirty starved skeletons"
Excerpt of a letter written by an American army officer to his family during the liberation of Dachau in April, 1945. the camp include a crematorium, where the bodies of those who had died or been killed were burned, and a memorial garden. One of the rooms in the crematorium may have been used as an experimental gas chamber, but there is no evidence that Dachau was a place of mass murder, as was Auschwitz.
Visiting Dachau, or any other Holocaust site (e.g., the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris) is a sobering experience. When I am confronted with the atrocities and mass murder of innocent human beings--by other human beings--it simply defies comprehension. It is moments like these when I am reminded of the Latin phrase -- Homo homini lupus (Man is wolf to man), to which Sigmund Freud alluded in his 1930 essay,
Civilization and Its Discontents:
"Men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit
his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?”
We walked out of the camp, back to Peter's car and then returned to our starting point at Rotkreuzplatz, where Rosita met us for lunch at Das Gasthaus Jagdschlössl, a Bavarian restaurant on the square. After lunch, we walked to Peter's favorite ice cream place on the square, Venezia, where we enjoyed banana splits and liquor-flavored sorbets before riding home on the bus.
Dee's Comments: The bus ride to meet Peter this morning was great, then back in his "limo" for the ride to Dachau. I had very mixed emotions about this visit to a former concentration camp, but it gave me a much better understanding of what I've read in history books over the years.
It was so sad to see images of the pain and suffering those poor people endured, the brutality, and the loss of lives--it is hard to comprehend.
And all due to one man, Hitler. I don't believe the memories of these atrocities should ever go away--each generation must be reminded, so that it never happens again.
After Rosita joined us for lunch, I had one of the most refreshing desserts ever--some kind of lime sorbet with a little booze--when we stopped so Mitch and Peter could have banana splits. Then home by bus after another great day!
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Jeni
non-member comment
Well said Dee, never forget and never again. On another note sorbet with booze, yum!