On Tuesday we joined a tour to Dachau, the first of hundreds of Nazi concentration camps. Dachau is about a 20 minute train ride north of Munich. Dachau was also the site of the SS academy where methods of torture and control were taught. The camp was originally set up to house political prisoners and anyone else the Nazi's deemed a threat to the party. During the course of its 12 years existence the camp became the site of thousands of murders. The camp was the smallest of all camps and because of logistics was not able to carry out the mass murders as were done at other camps.
The tour showed us replicas of the barracks used to house prisoners. The washroom and toilet facilities were sparse and as with everything else were intended to strip a person of their human identity. The SS were taught to never make eye contact with the prisoners, they were to be considered sub human. Prisoners had to keep their barracks clean, the floors could only be walked on in bare or stockinged feet. The least transgression whether real or imagined would result in whippings with a bull whip or being hung from the ceiling for hours at a time.
Then we went to the receiving station, there prisoners were catalogued with meticulous records and judged according to their work ability. We eventually made our way to the place where thousands were to take their final breath. Initially the building seems pretty non descript until you begin to go through and see how the Nazi's prepared their victims. First you see fumigation chambers where clothing was to be fumigated, then you go through a couple of more rooms until you come to another room where people were made to disrobe before entering the Brausebad for what they were led to be showers.
The gas chamber itself is not foreboding. It's a large room with strange looking "shower" heads from which the lethal gas was pumped into the room. The next room over is the room where the bodies were piled up until they removed by prisoners.Our next stop was a the crematorium. There were 4 ovens, each one could accommodate 3-4 bodies.
Overall the setting of the camp could seem very innocuous with trees, fields, and canals. Once you take in the sight of the guard towers, and the kill zone and the realization of what this all meant then it begins to strike you that this was all the result of mans inhumanity to man. This was a place where so many people suffered and perished losing all hope of a normal life.
We closed out our day with a train ride back to Munich, reflecting on what we had seen and needing to get some sense of present day reality.
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