Day #19: Dachau

Well, it wasn't a trip I was especially keen on taking. Concentration camps are never fun to go visit. But you feel compelled to go. As if you still can't comprehen how man could be so cruel as to slaughter his fellow man unless you see the place where it happened. That, and several other reasons, was why I spent a half day tour out to Dachau Concentration Camp.

Aushwitz and several others beat out Dachau in terms of sheer numbers of people murdered within their camps, but Dachau is important for a variety of other reasons, as I soon learned. Dachau was one of the first concentration camps opened in 1933, not long after Hitler assumed dictatorial powers. And what I did not know is that it was not intended as an extermination camp per se. The Nazis placed Dachau at the site of an old munitions factory and used the "prisoners" to help the war effort. The idea was to work them relentlessly under such inhumane conditions, that the workers would eventually die. You see in the gate to Dachau, the phrase "Freedom through Work." Considering the conditions they put people through, that phrase is both haunting and chilling.

Beyond being one of the first camps, Dachau became the blueprint for how other camps were structured and run. The second commandant of Dachau experimented with a numbe rof different methods of punishment and camp structure. He eventually "perfected" a cruelly efficient system and for his reward he was appointed the Inspector General of the concentration camp system and exported his "Dachau method" to other camps. That method proved so ingrained that when the German generals complained that the amount of deaths were hindering the production of war materials, the camp commandants couldn't change. Instead, they fudged the numbers of deaths to make it look better for them.

After leaving Dachau, I went back to Munich and caught a train to Salzburg. After I arrived and dropped my bag off at the hostel, I had enough time to do a quick self-guided tour of Salzburg's old town center. Salzburg is a beautiful city that has a river running right through the center of it. I'll have more on Salzburg in tomorrow's post!