Dachau Concentration Camp

It was a pretty fitting day to go and see the concentration camp at Dachau. Probably our coldest day yet, and it was snowing (I'm still excited about snow)! Dachau is known for being the first Nazi concentration camp, and was a model for all others. On our way here we heard a girl on the bus telling her friend she'd found 'his prison number.' They had booths where you could look up prisoners held here by their number. To the best of my knowledge there were a lot of prisoners unaccounted for.

 "Work will make you free."

While there is a gas chamber here masked as a shower room, it wasn't really used at Dachau. The slogan, 'Work will make you free,' is a more accurate account of how people died. They were worked to death. Some of the photographs on the information boards were pretty confronting. You begin to understand that during this period it was normal to see death... everywhere. The Nazi's would spread propaganda and make it appear as though their prisoners were happy to be here. Many photos are of the prisoners smiling. There was even a photo where the prisoners were 'building a swimming pool!' Which of course was a complete lie.

The building in the distance is a watch tower where prisoners were shot if they tried to escape. Many prisoners would intentionally run towards the watch towers to commit suicide.

The museum is set up in one of the original buildings (an old administration building). There are a collection of artifacts, photographs and information panels that you follow in a specific order. It would take hours to get through everything. The information is so detailed and brutally honest about everything that happened here. The personal accounts were the most interesting, along with the Nazi propaganda posters.

Joe the Eskimo.

As we made our way through the camp, there is this eerie kind of silence. I momentarily broke that silence when I giggled loudly after squishing a small mound of snow. I couldn't help it.

This building is the crematorium. It was built because the original one (further down the path) was running beyond capacity. This is also where the gas chamber is. There are shoots on the outside of the building where they would throw the poison into the chamber and lock it from the outside.

This contraption is I guess what you would call the oven? There was three in this room. As you move through the building there a number of rooms where the bodies to be cremated were stored.

This corridor goes for an age. Below is the what the cells look like where the prisoners to be punished were held. There was once rows and rows of barracks where the prisoners stayed that have since been burnt down. There were 32,000 documented deaths at the camp at Dachau, and many thousands more that are unaccounted for.

- Kate