My final day in Munich was spent at the Dachau concentration camp memorial. I debated over going for a while but ultimately decided it was an important place to see. It is one thing to read about it in books during a history lesson and quite another to visit a site of such atrocities. I planned to spend a couple of hours there, but it felt disrespectful to leave after so short a time and so I ended up spending the whole day there.
The remains of the train platform that brought prisoners to the camp.
Each one of these blocks was a barracks. There are 34 of them on the site. The camp was designed to hold 6,000 prisoners but was continually overcrowded and the day the camp was liberated 30,000 people imprisoned there.
The prisoners slept on triple bunks on straw mattresses. Even “bed making” was a punishment where arbitrary and pointless rules were to be followed by prisoners or face punishment.
Over 50 prisoners were supposed to use these two wash basins
Three memorials were constructed after the horrors of the camp for Catholics, Protestants and Jews
The memorial for those who follow Judaism
During the Nazi regime the camps fences were electrified. Some prisoners were so desperate to end their suffering that they ran into the fences. If that failed, they were frequently shot by guards in towers and their murders were frequently classed as suicides.
The crematorium
The inside of a gas chamber. Prisoners were brought into the chamber under the guise of getting a shower. On the ceiling there are a grid of gas vents designed to look like shower heads.
The crematorium often ran overcapacity and the remaining bodies were buried in mass graves.
“May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933 - 1945 because they resisted nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men”