Dachau Concentration Camp is one of the black marks of Germany history. Though I was surprised it actually was a very different camp than others. I’ll tell you all about it but first a very important warning.
Dear reader, as you can imagine we are about to talk about a darkest hour for humanity. Though what I’ll write will be based on history and proofs, these are indeed disturbing facts. So please only continue reading, after considering and acknowledging content of this article will likely be disturbing.
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Still here? Alright, I made my warning, here we go.
Before we dive in, here are some short info bites for your trip to Dachau.
How to go to Dachau Concentration Camp from Munich?
With Munich S-bahn line S2 you can get to Dachau from central station in about 20 minutes. Once you arrived at Dachau train station you can take a bus that goes directly to the front gate of Dachau Concentration Camp. Bus number is 726, but don’t worry there are directions that guide you there from S-bahn exit and it is just outside of train station (or you can just follow the tourist crowd!). This bus ride will again take short time about 10-15 minutes and you will get off at stop “KZ-Gedenkstätte”. You can buy „Munich XXL (München XXL)“ daily ticket for all trip, and if you are two people get the partner version it is slightly cheaper. (One person 8,8 euro, two people 15,9 euro –price in 2017). Your ticket is valid during all day and you can use it multiple times inside zones it covers.
Dachau Concentration Camp is open for visitors every day between 09:00 am to 17:00 pm. It will approximately take 2-3 hours visit. It is free to visit the Camp however I strongly suggest to join a guided tour, as otherwise you are likely to miss lots of info and just don’t see much of it. The guided tours are very cheap about 3 euro for a 2.5-3 hours guide which is quite reasonable. Check the tour times from here, if for some reason you are not able to catch one please at least get the audio guide!
Dachau Concentration Camp was in a large flat area and I was surprised to see residential homes nearby. Currently there is not much building left, as most of them are demolished because of bad conditions and hygiene problems, though some of them have been reconstructed for providing info for visitors. You can see infamous “Arbeit macht frei” iron door which roughly translates to `Working makes you free` which is of course a big lie. You can also see dorms and gas chambers and oven. Inside of the buildings there are many visual photos, documents and info exhibited. You can also catch a short documentary if you are interested. One important site is a monument in honor of prisoners which depicts them as they run into high voltage barbed wires. This monument is unfortunately inspired by real life as many prisoners thought even death like this is better than living in these concentration camps.
First thing I was really wondering about my visit here was, how will my German guide is going to describe what happened here. It is undeniably a very heavy humanity crime committed by his nation so I wondered if he would make subjective comments on his nation’s darkest history. But he was very objective and logical, as expected from German stereotype, and he made sure that the reason these dark pages of history needs to be known is we have to take lessons from it, so nobody never ever commit the same crimes again. He was an ex-army and after retiring, out of his interest, he was doing research and guide on Concentration Camps for 35 years! He also showed really special documents and photos from his own archive too, so needless to say I learned a lot from him. Now I’ll share with you what I learned.
(This paragraph is the last exit before it gets darker, so folks, you have been warned twice!)
Why Dachau Concentration Camp was different?
What makes Dachau Concentration Camp different than others was that it is actually one of the prototypes. So it basically served as a Research and Development center for other concentration camps. Initially it was opened only for men and political prisoners. But as you can imagine later on anyone opposing Nazi party and Hitler and Jews were also prisoners here.
One interesting thing here is somehow there were 6 women who managed to give birth in this Concentration Camp. It is worth noting because Dachau is the only concentration camp where a woman could give birth. That was possible probably because Dachau was an earlier camp where it only got more brutal later on. Sadly later on pregnant women were separated from start and immediately killed.
Dachau was an early small prototype but still following info from my guide was enough to freeze anyone’s blood,
`There has been only 4000 Russian soldiers mass executed here and only 40 thousand of 200 thousand prisoners died in Dachau. Unfortunately I say `only` because even though these numbers seems big compare it to other concentration camps for example in Auschwitz 1 million 100 thousands died out of 6 million prisoners!`
Unimaginable numbers isn’t it? I cannot even wrap it in my head. Think about all of your family members, neighbors, friends, and people you know, heck include all Facebook friends, how many you got? And now go back to numbers above again! And remember Dachau and Auschwitz are not the only concentration camps there were a lot more!
Explaining hierarchy in camps
In Dachau Concentration Camp, prisoner deaths were caused more by terrible living conditions rather than mass executions. So in a way German Nazi officers didn’t get their hand dirty and `get rid of` prisoners with other means. Describing living conditions in a concentration camp with an adjective like `terrible ` is still a very innocent way of saying. But I don’t think any language in the world has a word to describe all the horrors and conditions of it.
There was a strict and really well organized hierarchy between prisoners. (Not surprisingly as German like handling things in orderly fashion). And the lesser you are in this hierarchy your suffering just doubles. To make an example for hierarchy, for example there were even Germans as prisoners there, Germans because of political opposition or for having sexual relationship to a Jew. Camp in Dachau was also started with first German political prisoners but then expanded to other `enemies` or `unwanted` people for Germany. Anyway, so these German prisoners would be above Jew prisoners but make no mistake, if you are a prisoner, your life has no value, it is very unlikely that you have a good survival chance.
Germans used letters and colors to categories their prisoners and the lesser you are in the chain, number of daily deaths just increase and daily deaths of hundreds, thousands for some camps just became `normal`. A good example of how hierarchy affects conditions is dorms. The lesser you are in the hierarchy the dorm you are supposed to sleep in just gets more crowded as it is even possible to get more crowded then it already is! Sleeping together in one bed 4-5 people becomes `normal`. And how do they even fit in you ask?
Why wouldn’t they, prisoners were so malnourished even a young man weighted 38 kg (83 pounds) in average! They had no choice anyway. And for example if Nazis had a prisoner they specifically want to get rid of soon, they send him to the farthest dorms. Think very thin walls that doesn’t provide good protection against Bavarian winter which is very harsh and imagine waiting for food in the farthest dorm. The food comes from far away which in the meantime not only it gets cold but partly spilled along the way and partly eaten during the way. So you are not even able to get desperately needed handful of food if you are in farthest dorms. Not to mention there were no hygiene so sickness and diseases just spread like wildfire. And don’t forget prisoners are forced to work during the day!
On top of these, though there is not much record of this in Dachau, some prisoners were even more unlucky and they were subjects to German doctors’ human experiments. These human experiments were testing limits of human body against cold, hypothermia, pressure etc which to me sounds like even worse than direct torturing. The more you learn the horrors of concentration camps the more you feel despair. How could death of thousand became just an engineering problem of `how to get rid of the bodies? Oh I know, let’s make bigger ovens`? How could they systematically kill all these people and forced them to live in worse conditions than animals? Wasn’t there one sane human who questioned what the hell are we doing?
Actually there were, in fact a lot. I think at this point it is worth to note that back in time not all Germans supported and thought like Hitler. Though below is true:
Hitler was elected democratically!
It was never over %50 or something like that. It had the majority compared to other political partied but if I’m not wrong, the highest election scored Hitler’s party got was %44
What made Hitler the leader was not the majority, in fact the previous election before he became Fuhrer, he got only %37 (1932 elections). What made him leader with high power authority was the `Reichtag Fire` which occurred just 6 days before an important election (1933) and Hitler got `emergency powers` he got all the power authority he wanted. The real root of the fire is still debatable but many believe it was organized by Hitler as he was the one that benefited most.
Well after Hitler got `emergency powers`, he started immediately executing his powers to ban anything against Nazi propaganda and just abuse the power he had more and more until he became the dictator who just crushes anyone opposing him and doing what he wants. Even though more than the half of the people didn’t choose him, slipping into dictatorship from democracy was as simple as that!
The propaganda Nazi’s used, and their view was prisoners in their camps were `not human`. And since they were thinking they are `not human`, it was possible to emotionally detach themselves from what is happening to these people. The hard proof of Nazis didn’t see prisoners as human, came in the form of a contract between German government and BMW. It was my guide’s personal archive. In the contract, prisoners were discussed like a commodity, animal stock or something and it states like they usually have this much life (then they die) and when they die we’ll come pick of the bones and body (they were even made use of that!). And the price was a really symbolic price like 2 mark or something for days of slave work until they die! Don’t be surprised with BMW name, it was the same for Mercedes or other German brands at the time. And before you unleash your justified hatred on how could these perfectly imaged companies now could do that, well to be fair they had to. Because it was kind of `an order` from government using this slave work power. But as my German guide put it, nevertheless this doesn’t change the fact that these famous brands made use of it. (Unfortunately I forget to take photo of this document because I was trying to comprehend the horrors of it!)
One of the things, that `surprised`me, my guide told us that even amidst of horrors of these camps, Germans were careful to not commit `war crime`! How is it possible right?
Well, they tried to use loopholes in international laws. And they interpreted `gray zones` to their liking. Actually Nazi officers didn’t really get their hands dirty, they used other prisoners to punish or torture each other. Why would a fellow prisoner agree to that? Well, in promise of `little` exceptions to make their prisoner life a bit more bearable, promise of extra food, cigarettes, etc etc. But these prisoners, who agreed to cooperate with Nazis, have also additional problems. They are now hated by their fellow prisoners, and Nazis never saw them like a real human since they are prisoners anyway, so it was a double edged blade. Yet to survive, even one cup of food is something you are willing to sink low.
One thing that was really interesting to learn for me was, Hitler never ordered or signed for opening of concentration camps! Nor did he visit any! Maybe his officers took `eliminate opposition` quite literally, but actually there were also many Germans who didn’t know all the horrors of what was going on in these Nazi Concentration camps.
To give an example from Dachau history, when the USA troops come to liberate Dachau, after liberation they specifically gather and made civil Germans living near Dachau to see the situation in Dachau Concentration Camp. You can see the horror on the faces of Germans from the photos taken during their forced visit. However it would be naive to think they didn’t have any idea what was going on here in Dachau. They probably ignored and didn’t want to know, but of course it should also be noted the political situation of the time and the fact that any opposition to Nazis were punished harshly.
Also at the time of liberation of the camp, actually the initial sight and conditions of the camp was so bad and shocking that the USA soldiers, whose orders were to detain Nazi officers, actually got too frustrated and angry that they disobeyed their orders and killed 50 Nazi officers on sight!
But real saddening part is after liberation, USA troops gave food to the freed prisoners however 2000 of the prisoners die because their weakened body can no longer handler `proper` food ! (Later on, freed prisoners are given easy food in moderation to adjust their body)
The final moment of the tour was the moment that made the most impact on me, because after seeing and learning about how humanity can sink low, your only hope is that we took our lessons from it and we won’t repeat it again right?
At the last point, my tour guide showed a photo from his own archive, taken in an operation he also participated later on for liberation of a war prisoners camp in Soviets in 1992, and guess what the photos of prisoners, how they looked were same as Dachau prisoners, same malnourished, sad, broken souls! That is just 25 years ago folks, not so long ago!
History is really there to take lessons. We all need to remind ourselves how intolerance for others who are different to you can escalate into a horrible path. It is a simple empathy really. Has anyone has rights to belittle you, curse you, torture you because of you being you, because of your origins, your skin color, your language, your beliefs, your choices? No, absolutely no! So same for you folks, you also don’t have rights to belittle, curse, torture to those who are different than you! Simple as that!
It is really sad how a simple truth is easily missed and so much wrong happened but that’s exactly why we must learn about these `wrongs` and make sure they are not repeated. Ever again.
So before I finish, here are some additional info about Dachau Concentration Camp that were not possible to put into above flow of the article:
**Apparently there were also 3 Turk prisoners in Dachau, though I didn’t learned much about them it was an interesting note for me as a Turkish person.
**There was only one successful prisoner escape from Dachau Concentration Camp. And it was a German man who was able to escape with help from his outside allies. Actually it is really impossible for a Jew to escape here, because even if he did he would be quickly caught as he can’t speak the language, and there will be no one willing to help him risking their life. Nevertheless there were other tries but only this one German man managed to do it.
**There is a small creek inside the camp. I saw coins inside and was confused. Because as you know throwing coins into water like Rome’s famous fountain is an indication of wishful thinking to come back to this palace and I was surprised and confused to see it in a concentration camp. I asked my guide about it and he confirmed these were indeed thrown by tourists with this purpose! I am still confused though, because even as a tourist, this is not a place that you would like to return.
**One black market price example given for Dachau Concentration Camp was 1 cat is worth 20 cigarettes.
**Apparently at some point, there were women who served as `prostitutes` in the camp. However it is not clear that if these women were doing it out of their own will or forced. Likely they were one of the bargaining chips to make prisoners to do dirty work for Nazi officers.
**You will see lots of student groups when you are visiting Dachau Concentration Camp. It is mandatory in German schools to make visit to concentration camps so there will always be students from different age groups around.
**There are `gas chambers` and `ovens` in Dachau concentration Camp. But other than exceptional separate incident they were not used. This is one the things that makes Dachau different, as I mentioned already that there were not mass executions. So in a sense Dachau was the lesser evil of concentration camps but still evil no doubt in that.
Look at the page number!
**The infamous door of Dachau `Arbeit macht frei` was actually until recently stolen! But now it has been found and returned.
**At first people of Dachau, didn’t want Dachau concentration Camp to be opened to visitors, as no one wants to be associated with nightmares of the past. But the policy of we shall not forget and take lessons from history made it possible to make this camp open to visitors.
**You can see residual homes, apartments very close to Dachau Concentration Camp. I thought, wow that should be a depressing view from your balcony but according to my guide, apartments near here are actually quite expensive!
**As part of exhibition inside, there was a notebook with names of prisoners of Dachau. It was written in really small fonts and it was lined up by two columns per page yet the notebook was incredibly thick (thick enough to make even a medical student cry). And that was another hard representation of people who suffered here and it just makes you so heartbroken thinking even this much suffering was just a small piece as Dachau was only a prototype.
As usual I’m looking forward to your questions and comments! I know it has been a different article and not so pleasant one, but intention was to note the knowledge about Dachau Concentration Camp here, I hope you find it as informative as I intended.
