Dachau Concentration Camp was built in Nazi Germany as a “model camp” for other concentration camps. It mainly housed political prisoners, dissidents, and resistance fighters. The facility was designed to hold 5,000 prisoners. Population numbers fluctuated throughout the years, reaching peak capacity in 1944 at 78,635. When it was liberated in 1945, Allies discovered 30,442 prisoners inside.

Dachau Concentration Camp

We visited the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial on a beautiful summer day. The sky was a crisp blue with hardly a cloud to be seen. The grass and trees were bright green. The juxtaposition between the weather and the location seemed unsettling. Shouldn’t it be cloudy and dreary? Wouldn’t depressing weather feel more appropriate, somehow? Perhaps if the film score from Schindler’s List were playing in the background…

We entered the camp through the same building that thousands of prisoners had before: the Jourhaus. A single, small iron gate bars the entrance. The gate features the infamous slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes [you] free). This slogan was placed at the entrance to a number of Nazi concentration camps, although Dachau was one of the first to employ it. The slogan was allegedly coined by Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels in an effort to convince the public that the Nazi concentration camps were merely work camps designed to politically rehabilitate Communists, Social Democrats, and anarchists.

The camp contained 34 prisoners barracks which were built under forced labor conditions by the prisoners themselves. Initially each barrack was designed to hold 208 prisoners, but by the end of 1944 there were 1,600 prisoners in each barrack. Today, two reconstructed barracks showcase what the barracks would have looked like during the years before the camp became overcrowded. The other barracks were torn down in 1964 and their locations are represented by 32 gravel beds.

The prison barracks soon after the liberation of the camp in 1945. [Source]

To the rear of the camp lies the Bunker, or Lagerarrest. The Bunker was essentially a camp prison within the prison, and was used from 1938 to 1945 to incarcerate high-level “enemies of the state”. Inmates of the Bunker would serve periods of punitive detention in one of its 137 small cells.  Some of the cells were divided into smaller “standing cells” where prisoners could do nothing but stand for days on end.

The Bunker’s two long corridors house 137 cells.

The camp museum tells the story of life in Dachau. Unapologetic images reveal the overcrowding, murder, and human medical experimentation that took place. A 22-minute documentary film graphically depicts the history of the camp. There was a quiet respectfulness amongst the museum visitors as the haunting images and testimonies sunk in. It was if everyone was trying to project some scrap of dignity and hope to those whose humanity was so viciously stripped away.

A polyptych in the Dachau Museum showcases images of overcrowding, murder, and human experimentation.

Dachau Badge Classification Chart

A perimeter fence surrounded the camp. The fence was designed to make escape impossible, and featured a sentry walk, electric fence, barbed-wire obstacles, a ditch, and a prohibited area. The instant a prisoner entered the prohibited zone, he was fired upon. Some prisoners ran into the border strip on purpose in order to put an end to their suffering.

The perimeter of the camp featured a sentry walk, electric fence, barbed-wire obstacles, a ditch, and a prohibited area.

Unlike other concentration camps that were constructed as part of the Nazi’s Final Solution to the Jewish Question, Dachau was not designed to be a death camp. It does, however, contain a gas chamber disguised as a “shower room” (Brausebad in German). An undressing room furnished with soap and towels helped maintain the illusion of a shower room.  There are conflicting reports as to whether the gas chamber was ever used for mass execution. The modern day report testifies that the SS murdered individual prisoners and small groups here using poison gas.

The Brausebad was a gas chamber disguised as a shower room.  There are conflicting reports concerning its use.

Compared to other concentration camps, there were relatively few deaths in Dachau in the early years. A double furnace crematorium was built in 1940 to dispose of the bodies and prevent the spread of disease. This original crematorium was outside the prison compound and hidden from the prisoners by a row of poplar trees. However, the crematoria area was close enough to the prison barracks that the inmates could smell the stench of the burning bodies.

A new, larger crematorium known as “Barrack X” was completed in 1943 to help dispose of the ever-increasing dead. Barrack X contained disinfection chambers, a changing room, the Brausebad, and a crematory with five ovens. Prisoners who worked in Barrack X later gave testimony to the methods the SS used to dispatch prisoners. Some were hung by their necks from the rafters of the crematory until dead, forced to watch as their comrades were burned. Others were killed by lethal injection. Some were disposed simply because they had dysentery or were considered by the camp nurses as too much trouble. The most common method of execution was by shooting. By October 1944, use of the ovens had ceased due to shortage of coal. When American liberators arrived, bodies were piled inside and outside the building.

Barrack X housed a larger crematorium, a disinfection chamber, and a gas chamber.

In January 1945 as the Soviet Army began to overtake Nazi-occupied Poland, thousands of survivors from eastern death camps were brought to over-crowded camps in Germany, including Dachau. Along with the new wave of prisoners came a raging typhus epidemic which spread throughout the camp. Almost half of the deaths in Dachau occurred in the final five months of the war. During the working years between 1933 and 1945, there were nearly 32,000 documented deaths at the camp, and thousands went undocumented.  In the months following the camp’s liberation, over 2,400 additional inmates died of typhus and malnutrition.

Some prisoners were hung by the neck until dead from the rafters before being burned in the new crematory ovens.

Zena and I were able to spend only a few short hours touring the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial. I regret that we didn’t spend more time there. Visiting Dachau brought me to a point of sobering introspection. The realities of the evil to which humans are capable is no more apparent than here. One of the memorials in the camp is a simple stone wall with the words “Never Again” written in Hebrew, French, English, German, and Russian. Never again. In my heart I wish that were true, but when I look at the atrocities that have been perpetrated since then and continue on today, my faith in humanity wavers.

In another corner of the camp stands an apropos statue with a stark inscription at its base: “Honor the Dead.  Warn the Living.” That is why Dachau exists today.

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