"Work brings freedom"
Dachau is 20 minutes by train north of Munich. Here, outside the town, from 1933 to 1945 was the Dachau Concentration Camp. The first and longest running concentration camp of the Nazis, Dachau was also the training ground for those running other concentration camps including Auschwitz. Originally built to house 6,000, during the war years Dachau held as many as 30,000 prisoners.
The camps were portrayed by the Nazis to the rest of Germany and to the world as re-training camps providing appropriate living conditions and healthcare to the trainees. This propaganda campaign was aided by staged photographs and control of all outgoing mail. In reality Dachau was a slave camp where inmates were forced to work in unimaginable conditions. Petty ‘crimes’ were punished with beatings, restraints or death by shooting. Numbers of people did not make it into the camp – they arrived outside the camp, were taken to the ‘showers’ and were gassed. 40,000 innocent people died at Dachau through murder, starvation, overworking and overcrowding leading to disease.
The perimeter consisted of a ditch, barbed wire, electric fence, brick wall with wire and over 1000 guards on patrol.
In May 1945, the prisoners at Dachau were liberated by the American forces. The camp was subsequently occupied by the US Army.
Memorial sculpture
Today the site is a memorial, museum and a reminder that such atrocities must occur ‘never again.’ The original and some reconstructed buildings can be viewed – prisoner barracks, the bunker, gas chamber, crematorium and guard towers. It was sobering (if not enough already) that one of the memorials from the 1960s (see photo) failed (purposely) to recognise three of the persecuted minority groups. This has since been rectified in other memorials. It is now compulsory that all German schoolchildren visit a concentration camp.
1960's memorial. The different shapes and colours were worn by the prisoners according to the SS's classification.
