Dachau

Dachau is a small town with about 40,000 inhabitants. In March 1933, the Nazis established a Concentration Camp in an old gunpowder factory which later became the first official Concentration Camp. The fact that Bavaria had a Nazi interior minister, Adolf Wagner, appointed in March 1933, made the establishment of the camp easier. When the concentration camps were reorganized in 1936, Dachau were kept while most other camps were dismantled and replaced with new ones. Nazis then began to imprison homosexuals, Jehovah’s witnesses, priests, freemasons, prostitutes, Jews and all prisoners had to do hard work. Dachau was the first camp of Nazism to act as a model for all the other concentration camps that were established around Germany and Europe. At first Dachau had a capacity of 5000 prisoners, but in 1937 this proved to be insufficient and the camp was therefore expanded in 1938. The first prisoners to be held in Dachau were political prisoners. They were usually released after a few months or up to a year when the Nazis felt that they had been transformed into good citizens. After the war broke out, Dachau came to provide the entire southern German war industry with slave labor. In block 5, Dr Sigmund Rascher, conducted medical experiments on prisoners who were exposed to oxygen deprivation, salt water ingestion, starvation and hypothermia. The experiments were thoroughly documented. In the spring of 1942, adjacent to the camp, a crematorium with two ovens was built.

In the spring of 1943, a larger crematorium was built with six ovens next to the old one. The new crematorium was called Baracke X and consisted of, in addition to the ovens, a gas chamber, a morgue and a disinfection room for clothes.  Whether the SS used the gas chamber or not is still under discussion. According to the museum, it was not used, but some former prisoners says it was used to gas people. About 2.5 kilometers north of the camp in a village called Hebertshausen, the SS had a shooting range and there about 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war were shot. Auschwitz first commandant Rudolf Höss first served in Dachau and gained experience. It was also from his time in Dachau he got the idea of having the text, Arbeit macht frei, over the camp gate in Auschwitz. The camp was liberated by American forces on April 29, 1945, and like Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald, the liberation was filmed. According to Nazi documents, between 1933 and 1945, 206,000 prisoners were registered, but the figure is probably greater when prisoners arrived without being registered.

After the liberation and the war, the camp was used for various purposes. Accommodation for former prisoners who were seriously ill or were waiting to be repatriated. But also to house Nazi party officials and members of the SS awaiting trial. Between 1945 and 1947, the US military court held in the camp 489 trials of suspected Nazi war criminals. At the end of the forties, parts of the camp were used as a reception camp for expelled Germans. In the early sixties, the Bavarian government decided to establish a museum on the site. However, the barracks were in such poor condition that they were demolished, they had also been heavily modified and rebuilt for new purposes from 1945 onwards. Two barracks were reconstructed to give the visitor an insight.