Day Three - Dachau

     Today we visited The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, located just outside of Munich. Over 700,000 people a year visit this memorial. Dachau was the very first "state concentration camp" built, and was used as a model for the others. It is the only camp to have existed throughout the entire 12 years of Nazi rule (1933 - 1945). Opened on March 22, 1933 on the site of an unused munitions factory from the First World War, its first purpose was to house political prisoners ...this same year Hitler became Reich Chancellor, and the National Socialist dictatorship was established. It was a sobering visit and we are still processing what we saw and learned during the time we spent walking the grounds, and looking at the exhibits. The writings of the prisoner's first-hand accounts were especially powerful.

    

     You are not allowed to visit Dachau if you are younger than age 12. Our tour guide, who grew up in Munich, said when he and his classmates toured Dachau in elementary school, it was one of the darkest days of his life and he suffered nightmares for years afterwards. He said to this day, when women who live in Dachau give birth, they go to a hospital outside of town as they don't want that city's name on their child's birth certificate.

The entry gate (viewed from the outside in...)

Just before you enter is this sign..

This is one of only two housing barracks which remain on the memorial site

Here is where the many other barracks used to be.  A watchtower is in the distance.

A contemporary sculpture outside one of the memorial buildings.

     As described in Fodor’s “The former camp has become more than just a grisly memorial; it’s now a place where people of all nations meet to reflect upon the past and on the present.”  Indeed there are several religious shrines at the far end of the camp to honor the dead.

One of the religious memorials, this one is Catholic.