A travel report on an older trip. This one from November 2016.
I'd visited Dachau concentration camp before. A little over 10 years ago, I had travelled to Munich for a football match. This time I'd be there with Pamela, for a much quieter holiday. I had mixed feelings about going back to Dachau.
Dachau, much like any concentration camp or war memorial is one of those things you visit knowing that you are going to have a fairly unpleasant time. You'll never have a 'great day out for all the family- 5 stars' at a concentration camp. You go out of obligation, respect, curiosity, not because you expect to enjoy yourself.
It was with this in mind that we did it on the first day of the trip. Better to get it out of the way and then have time to 'recover' as the holiday went on rather than ending things on a down note.
Dachau was further from the city centre than I remembered. We must have stayed closer to it the last time. What I took away from the first visit was that I was surprised that the camp had been so close to Munich. I had been under the impression that all that was hidden away from the German public in Poland and other far away places. Looking at it now, it is quite a distance away from the city and I'm guessing that in Germany in the 40s that it wasn't all that easy to move about to go get a look at things.
This time, as we approached the camp, my thoughts were about how this was such a lovely area. You associate things of this nature with darkness, literally and figuratively. We arrived on a beautiful day in November. The sky wasn't stormy and it wasn't raining. It was a crisp, early winter's day.
It was an odd sensation, to be thinking about how pleasant an area it was, considering what the area had been. I wonder if anyone at that camp had ever been able to look around at the trees or the skies and enjoy it, in any way. I think it shows how little I can imagine the victims of this place's plight that the thought even enters my mind.
To avoid the groups of tourists, once we entered the gates, we went round the side, rather than head straight into the centre of the camp where the main museums sits. It was here that we found a bit of the camp I hadn't visited before. The Bunker was the name for the camp prison. I've visited old prisons before in Melbourne and Inveraray but this one was immediately more intimidating. Unlike the previous two mentioned, which were built on multiple levels in a 'U' shape, the Bunker was one long corridor with cells on either side. To walk in the door in the middle and see the cell block stretch out in either direction actually takes your breath away.
Prisoners placed in here varied from political ones, who were relatively well treated and the less fortunate ones who were beaten and tortured, often to death.
The hanging poles can be seen in the courtyard behind the bunker in the photograph below. I think the simplicity of the torture makes it seem even more horrific.
Some of the cells have information boards in them and often have the details of the people kept and killed in the cells. It really brings home that this wasn't that long ago. This isn't like looking at carvings on the walls in Rome depicting the torture of Christians. They can tell you just about everything you'd need to know about some of the people kept here. The information is all still there. Even the second time round it doesn't feel any less overpowering.
It seems the final governor of the camp put a stop to the torture in the later years of the war. Given what else I've read about him (assuming I'm reading about the right guy), I'm not sure of his reasoning for this but it doesn't obviously seem one of clemency.
Back into the main area of the camp and we were back into the areas I was familiar with from my first visit. We had the option of going into the museum section but decided to walk around first and end there as it was likely we'd be in there for a while.
The next part to visit was the sleeping quarters. Another eye opener of many eye openers. Dozens of beds crammed into huts, the conditions must have been unbearable. I get annoyed if I don't get a good sleep the night before an early start at work. The hut that is there now (I think it might be a more recent recreation) can't possibly give you an accurate idea of how things were at the time. In fact there's a pleasant smell of wood in the air. Everything is nice and clean and tidy to make sure tourists don't trip over things.
All of the huts are now gone with the exception of the one we were in, leaving just a large open area that you can see out the window in the photograph below. All of the grey marks on the ground are the foundations of a hut. The camp covers an extensive area of ground. And this is only half of it. The area to the left of those trees on the left mirrors this one. Beyond that was an area used by the SS which has since been redeveloped into civilian use.
Estimates of the camp's population varies but it was suggested that over the course of the Nazi administration that around 200,000 people were kept here. When the camp was liberated by allied soldiers, 30,000 prisoners were freed.
We then walked to the memorials. Visible in the picture above at the end of the barracks complex is the Jewish memorial. There are various memorials present to represent the various religions and cultures that were targeted by the Nazis.
Part of the Jewish Memorial at Dachau
Part of the Catholic Memorial at Dachau
The memorials really are beautiful. Each one was so peaceful and thoughtful. It was nice to get away from the more horrifying parts of the camp.
Of course, the most horrifying part was just further down the path.
That part was of course, the gas chambers and crematorium. Nothing can quite prepare you to walk into rooms where you know that thousands of innocents were murdered in cold blood. And they look as menacing as you'd imagine. There was no attempt to dress them up as something else.
The shower room. "Brausebad" (translation: showers) is apparently no longer used by modern German speakers due to the association with the concentration camps.
It's a place that you really don't want to spend much time in and we didn't. It's really not a pleasant feeling at all. We read the information boards and moved on.
Though the next room was no better. I'm sure you know what this is. The use of these ovens is one of the main reasons that it's impossible to put an accurate number to the death count of Dachau. Estimates put that death count at around 30,000.
We left this area, feeling rather down and headed to the museum part to put it all into context.
This bit had been revamped since I was there last. There is now an almost incomprehensible amount of information available that walks you through the history of the camp from its earliest days to how it is now. You can skim read the information points or study each artefact that has been included down to the finest detail. It's an impressive museum.
We sat outside for a while, just taking the place in. It was quiet. There were still tours going from place to place but the space is so large and away from the city that there's very little noise. We liked that it was respectful. I've visited war museums in Japan and found it interesting how they blame the USA for their behaviour in WWII. There's none of that here. It's all laid bare for people to see. The camp serves as a memorial to the dead but also as a warning to the living.
The words, "Never Again" adorn the wall in the photo above. In our time in Munich we also visited the Stadt Museum. It was similarly regretful and went into great detail about how the Nazis managed to gain control of the country. The language they used was strikingly similar to some of our own politicians today. When I first learned of the Nazis as a child, the first question that came to mind was always, "how?". How could they do this? How could they get other people to do this? One of the things that stuck out there was that Jewish Doctors were being forced out of practices in Germany. Only weeks before our trip here, our own British Prime Minister had spoken about foreign doctors being replaced by British ones. We are obviously not at the stage of 30s Germany but the connections are there to be seen.
Dachau and the Nazi movement is totally at odds with modern day Germany. It's a beautiful place with many cultures and friendly people. Maybe historians would disagree but I think it's quite impossible to fully appreciate the circumstances that led to the population following Hitler the way they did. I only hope it's a concept that remains alien to me.
If you've never been to a concentration camp, it's a hard thing to recommend. You'll have more fun at a water park, for sure. But I think that everyone should see one in their lifetime. We can never know exactly what it was like to be a prisoner in Dachau, even with all the information available in the museum. But it will give you an idea. As people of the WWII era are dying of old age, it's more important than ever that we familiarise ourselves with these atrocities before we make the same mistakes again.
