"Concentration camp memorial" |
"Work Makes Free" - the camp entrance |
Guard tower and electric fence |
Interior of a barracks |
Interior of a barracks |
|
Next stop for us was the capital of Bayern (Bavaria), München (Munich). We spent Saturday night there, walked a bit around the central part of the city, and saw the impressive Neues Rathaus, the New Town Hall built in Flanders Gothic style. We chose this city as a destination because of its proximity to the Dachau concentration camp memorial, which we planned to visit the following day.
A couple of years ago I visited the former Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland. It had a profound effect on me, and it sparked in a historical interest in World War II which I never expected to have. There is some sort of feeling, an odd energy and sense of empathy you get from standing on the grounds where countless atrocities have occured. With all this in mind, I wanted to visit Konzentrationslager-Gedenkstätte Dachau and compare it to Auschwitz. Where Auschwitz may have been the most infamous of the concentration camps, Dachau was the first. Established in 1933 as Hitler was seizing power, Dachau was originally opened to be a camp for political prisoners. As the Nazis became more intolerant of other members of society, the population of Dachau changed (and grew) to reflect that.
Both Dachau and Auschwitz have a museum with photographs and brief descriptions of the events which occured in those camps. And at both camps, we were given guided tours of the grounds combined with an in-depth history of the camps and the day-to-day lives of the prisoners held captive there. I do think the Auschwitz tour hit me much harder than Dachau, and not only because it was my first visit to a concentration camp. The material was presented differently. The museum was much more graphic, showing a greater number of photographs of prisoners, living and dead, and that helps you to understand. There is something about staring into the (photographed) eyes of a person which allows you to see into their soul and understand that these were individuals, people like you and me, that were captured, tortured, and killed. Also, much more of the Auschwitz and related Birkenau camps remain, thus it is easier to imagine what day-to-day life would have been like there.
Our tour of Dachau lasted about 2.5 hours as our guide tried to verbally reconstruct what life was like in the concentration camp. One notable thing he described was the standing torture prisoners were forced to undergo on a daily basis - they were made to stand perfectly still, no slouching or shifting, for periods of one to many hours as roll call was done and the numbers were tallied. As we stood for 15 minutes or so listening to him, trying to move and thus relieve our slight discomfort, we began to get just an inkling of what the torture must have been like.
I must point out that today, Germany as a whole is quite ashamed of its role during World War II. Not only are the German people very sensitive to the mention of anything regarding the Holocaust or the Nazis, but they also seem to have a guarded sense of patriotism - they are not embarassed of their nationality but neither they do not want to be considered the same Germans that blindly followed Hitler's beliefs. And because of this, they temper their nationalism so it does not get carried away as before. This attitude was quite different than what we were to see the following week in Russia.
|
|
Hallway within the Wirtschaftsgebäude |
 |
Two views of the ovens |
Memorial sculpture |
 |
|
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
)
