Just outside of Munich is the first Nazi concentration camp, Dachau. It’s part of a small town of the same name. There isn’t much left of the original camp, but it is now a memorial site. Two of the barracks have been reconstructed and the “crematorium” is still there. That’s about it.

Visitors still enter through the gates that the prisoners did, marked with Arbeit macht frei (work brings freedom). There’s a large open space and then marked spaces where the barracks were.

Removing most of the original architecture removed a lot of the meaning of the place for me. Luckily, I had a little audio guide that included some personal accounts. Realizing that this camp was just in the midst of a town, what really fascinated me was how this all happened and what the response was. It seems that people generally knew something bad was going on, but even after the introduction of the camp, locals liked the revenues that supplying the camp brought. I was never quite convinced that people were wholly ignorant of what was going on. After all, the camps would have been ineffective as tools of terror if people didn’t know. No reports were allowed out of the camps, but international media were allowed in – and they were all duped. So you had the world getting this picture of model prisons, and the SS spreading rumors about the cruelty inside. Surely living next door to this thing one would know which to subscribe to. Maybe locals believed the propaganda about the need for these camps, maybe they knew what was going on – but times were tough financially and raising your voice would only get you placed inside.

I have posted some pictures. No worries – nothing graphic.

 

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