Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial

Last week the kids had the week off from school.  It was called Ski Week.  All the German schools had it off too for a holiday called Fasching.  It involves women cutting off men's ties and then kissing them and everyone dressing up like Halloween.

So on Tuesday Jason and I went to Dachau because I wanted to see what it was like before I took anyone else and also because I needed babysitters at home.  We didn't get there until about 1:30 and it closed at 5:00 so I didn't feel like I got to see and read everything.  I took Hayley and Camilla back on Friday and spent another 4 hours.  It was sobering to remember how many people died and also to realize how many people bought in to Hitler's insanity.  There were over a million men in the SS alone.  That doesn't count the regular German army and the Gestapo.  I'm sure there could have been many in the regular German army that didn't agree with Hitler, but it's hard to imagine anyone in the Gestapo or the SS not agreeing with him completely.

Besides the many people who died, there were even more who survived, at least at Dachau (I don't know figures for other camps), who were treated as subhumans.  About 200,000 people passed through Dachau in it's 12 years and it was not the biggest camp.  Here's a picture of all the concentration camps and their subcamps in Germany and surrounding countries. 

All the black bars are main camps and all the little squares are sub camps.

Imagine how many people were imprisoned in them during their years of operation.  Dachau was the first to open and opened in 1933.  Hitler put political enemies here in those early years.  Then, as they annexed other countries he interred government leaders and resistance fighters from those countries.  Then people of "inferior quality" like Jews, homosexuals, Gypsies and Poles. Then Russian and other prisoners of war.  Many clergy, especially from Poland, were interred at Dachau.  The camp was intended to house 5-6000 people but it was always crowded and when it was liberated it had 30,000 people in it.  (2,000 people died within a few days after liberation from sickness and weakness and disease.)  When the Americans liberated Dachau they forced the citizens from the town of Dachau to come see the piled up bodies and other evidence of what had happened there.  It shows some of this in the movie and they are covering their mouths and noses and retching.  I like to believe that most of them didn't know exactly what was going on.

Even though it was the scene of such horror, all I felt there was peace and reverence.  It was very quiet.  It was like the evil of what had happened didn't stick to the place or the bodies buried there.  The memorial statues and structures were all about remembrance and not letting anything like it happen again.  There were stories and pictures of terrible conditions and deaths and tortures but there were also stories of resistance and survival.  I can't imagine experiencing something like that and going on with life but so many did.  Maybe part of their spirit of survival was hanging in the camp.

Here's some pictures.

Here are Hayley and Camilla outside the gates.

We're still outside the gates with the mocking phrase "Work Makes You Free".

There were 40 barracks buildings but they were all torn down.  They reconstructed 2 for people to see.

A gathering room and lockers.

These are reconstructed bunks.  The rules in camp were that every bed must be made and all the (straw) mattresses in a row must be at an identical height.  The blankets must hang down an identical lenth from the bed, the floors must be spotless and polished, etc.  The signs describe it as a mockery of military order and as a planned means for demoralizing the prisoners and for excuses to beat prisoners or hang them from their wrists (arms behind them and wrists tied together). 

At Dachau there were only men until near the end when they brought women from Ravensbruck to be in a brothel.  They hoped to encourage harder work.

I saw a picture of a man who hanged himself from the top of this wash basin.  His body was draped over the edge of the sink, his knees were bent and his lower legs and feet resting on the floor.

The main monument in front of the administration building.  Today is is a museum.

Looking at the administration building from the barracks across the large roll call area.

Behind the Administration building there was a prison for giving solitary confinement, housing "special" prisoners and torturing.  The "special" prisoners were well-known people, political prisoners, and others.

There are 4 relilgious memorial buildings inside the fence on the grounds of the camp.  This one is the Jewish one and I liked it the best.  I thought that starting up at the top and descending down the ramp into a dark and small enclosure with an iron gate to lock you in and then seeing light coming from a small opening at the top was so symbolic and moving and simple.

This was another religious memorial, I think the protestant one.  It's a functioning church.  It's architect designed it with no right angles or geometric shaped rooms to be the opposite of the rigidity in the camp.

At the back of the camp you go across the moat and through the barbed wire fence to the Crematorium area.  All the dead prisoners were cremated here.

This statue is just inside the grounds of the crematorium.  I haven't been able to get a very good translation but it talks about the dead and the living and honoring and warning.

Around the ouside edges of the crematorium grounds is a secluded walk that takes you by several mass burial sites.  Towards the end of the war they ran out of coal and so they had to start digging big mass graves.  They still couldn't get everyone buried before the camp was liberated.  There was also a stone which said ashes were buried there.

Also on the walk around the crematorium.  If you can't read the sign it says Execution Range with Blood Ditch.

This innocent looking building is the Crematorium.

They added a gas chamber in the Crematorium in the last years of the war but it was never used in their regular routines like ones in other places.  People were killed in here but not in methodical processes like at Auschwitz.

Here are the actual furnaces in the Crematorium.

In the movie we saw a short clip of Goehring giving a speech about the "Jewish Problem".  He was a normal looking guy and there was a whole audience of normal looking people cheering him.

On a lighter note, whenever I tell Miles it's time for bed he says "Just a minute mama!"  Then he starts pointing to his fingers one at a time and says "This minute, and this minute, and this minute, ..., okay mama?"  He somehow gets 8 minutes off one hand.