Day 197: Wednesday 1 October – Bavaria: Dachau, by Ken

Heavy overnight rain was still falling when we got up. After breakfast and showering we parked Smarty next to the camping ground owner’s house and as shelter while we used the wi-fi. It seemed the signal wasn’t good enough for us to download stuff simultaneously. Jane managed to access camping ground data for our next few stays, but I only managed to download my email. Disconcertingly, there was nothing from Clemente in Goa in response to mine saying he appeared to have given us incorrect bank details. I emailed him again.

We set a course for Dachau and were on our way in Smarty just after 9:00. It was still raining and the initial stages on autobahns weren’t a lot of run in the heavy spray thrown up by trucks and cars that were still travelling very fast. It was interesting to see another example of German discipline when even the fastest cars slowed down approaching roadworks where speed limits progressively reduced the permissible speed to 80kph. We saw this a few times and drivers complied without exception.

We also learnt the importance of keeping a careful eye on what is going on behind when driving on an autobahn with no speed limit. Often a car that appears as a mere speck a long way behind transforms itself into a Porche or Ferrari that will come whistling past a few seconds later and disappear into the distance equally quickly.

The autobahn took us into the southern outskirts of Munich. Traffic was very heavy and progress wasn’t helped by a lot of roadworks with underpasses under construction. We skirted around the west side of the city passing the Olympic park where my Dad and I had watched Nottingham Forest win the European Cup (soccer) in 1979. In those day driving from England to Munich to watch a football match seemed like a major adventure. The Munich Olympics, of course, were notable for the massacre of the Israeli athletes.

As we were leaving the northern fringes of Munich we passed the massive MAN factory with literally hundreds of new trucks parked outside as well as a few busses. We reached the largish town of Dachau after driving through open country for a while. The route to the KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau (the site of the concentration camp) was well signed.

It stopped raining just as we parked Smarty at 10:30 in one of the large car parks close to the visitor centre. A display board advised there was a guided tour in English starting at 11:00 but we found that was fully subscribed. We booked two places on the 13:00 tour for a remarkably cheap €6. The tour would last 2½ hours after which we could spend as long as we liked visiting the museum and elsewhere in the camp.

We made our way to the museum housed in the concentration camp’s maintenance building passing through the iron entrance gate bearing the words “Arbeit Machs Frei” (“work makes you free) which, of course, was the antithesis of what happened in Dachau. From a brief look at part of the museum we could see it was very good explaining the rise of the National Socialist party and the Nazi party’s decree that allowed political opponents and others to be interned in concentration camps without trial. The museum contained a theatre where we saw a good, but harrowing, documentary on the concentration camp.

We made our way back to the visitor centre and its café for lunch – fish and chips for Jane, goulash soup for me. Afterwards, while we sat outside while waiting for our tour to start a group of men and women in military uniforms began to congregate there.

Servicemen Awaiting Tour

Shortly before 13:00 Anouska, our guide arrived. She explained in very good English that in spite of her name, she was German. Our group was comprised mainly of Americans, an Aussie and a Japanese couple. Our tour started at the camp’s main gates where there were plaques honouring the American armoured division that liberated Dachau in April 1945. Anouska mentioned the Americans took the original “Arbeit Macht Frei”, what we could now see was a replica. Her style was that of asking questions such as when standing in front of a photograph of prisoners she asked what we could see in it. It was a propaganda photograph showing well-fed men with their heads bowed in subdication. She also wanted to know what the difference was between a prison and a concentration camp explaining the former was where you were sent after being found guilty by trial, the latter was where you would be sent without trial. She also made the point that unlike most of the others Dachau was not an extermination camp, while it had gas chambers they were not used on a large scale.

Anouska

Dachau Main Gate

Parade Ground With Barrack Blocks Behind

We were shown two barrack blocks that had been reconstructed just the foundations remain of the other 32 blocks. Inside, each barrack were four ‘Stuben’ comprised of a day room and a dormitory where prisoners ate and slept, cheek by jowl on straw mattresses on three tiered bunks. Two Stuben shared common washing and toilet facilities. As originally configured the camp was designed to house more than 6,000 prisoners. Actual numbers held there were significantly more than that.

Bunks

Barrack Toilets

Life for prisoners was extremely harsh. In the summer their day began at 4:00 am with Reveille followed by a roll call at 5:15. They worked from 6:00 to 12:00 and again from 13:00 to 18:30. There was another roll call at 19:00 and lights out was at 21:00. Winter days were similar except they started at 5:00 am.

When the camp opened in 1933 prisoners were provided enough food - described as monotonous, but they were allowed to receive money to buy more at exorbitant prices. That all changed with the advent of war when food rations were far below requirements. Consequently prisoners scavenged for food eating potato peelings, roots, etc. Malnutrition resulted in disease with tuberculosis and dysentery being common. While there were doctors in the camp, the SS decided whether a prisoner was ill and needed to see a doctor. However, the doctors had little interest in treating the sick. Admission to the infirmary usually meant prisoners were left to die.

The work regime was severe where the SS drove the prisoners until they were completely exhausted through working in quarries or on construction sites. When there was no meaningful work available prisoners were given meaningless tasks such as shifting a pile of rocks and then shifting it back again. There was little rest for the prisoners when they returned to the barracks being made to scrub floors, clean dishes and lockers and make beds, sometimes over and over again. These menial tasks were often accompanied by brutal treatment from the guards.

Some prisoners were so weak they knew they were going to die and rather than wait for the inevitable committed suicide by running into the camp’s electrified perimeter fence or walking into the grassed prohibited area in front of the fence, knowing they would be shot by guards in watchtowers.

Perimeter Fence and Grassed Prohibited Area

Watchtower

Anouska took us to the memorials erected in the camp after the war, these included Jewish, Protestant and Catholic. 

Memorial

From the memorials we crossed through the perimeter fence to visit the camps crematoria. A crematorium was built in 1940 to deal with the rapidly increasing number of deaths, within a year it was unable to cope and a second, larger, crematorium was built nearby. The newer facility incorporated a gas chamber that was never used for mass extermination although some prisoners allege small groups of prisoners were killed there. Like gas chambers elsewhere that at Dachau was disguised as a shower facility complete with dummy shower heads in the ceiling. Two chutes in an outside wall allowed gas cylinders to be dropped into the chamber. Beyond the chamber was the incinerator room where four furnaces could take three bodies at a time. The incinerator room was also where some prisoners were hanged.

Original Crematorium

Crematorium Furnace

Second Crematorium

New Furnaces

Chutes For Gas Cylinders

Gas Chamber Entrance (Brausebad = Shower Bath)

Gas Chamber (Dummy Shower Heads in Ceiling)

In addition to death by starvation, punishment and suicide a number of prisoners were ‘shot while trying to escape, a euphemism for murder’ and a large number of Russian soldiers were shot outside the camp.

When the Americans liberated the camp in April 1945 they found almost 3,000 corpses in and around the crematoria. In all more than 206,000 prisoners passed through Dachau and it is believed nearly 42,000 died there.

Our 2½ tour with Anouska ended at a sculpture outside the maintenance building depicting the various identity patches of different shapes and colours identifying the various prisoner groups. These included ‘Political’, ‘Jehovah’s Witness’, ‘homosexual’ and ‘Jew’ although there were not many Jews in Dachau, they being sent to the extermination camps in the east.

Identity Patch Sculpture

Anouska was a very good guide and dealt well with some tricky questions and an American who wanted to show her his photographs of the town liberated by his father in World War II. She also explained that the memorial site (the concentration camp) was established so that Germany could learn from the experience. The reason the tour cost  so little was to encourage as many people as possible to visit. Also, a visit to Dachau was a compulsory part of military training, that is why soldiers were there that afternoon.

We left Anouska and returned to the museum which added more flesh to her very good explanation of life and death at Dachau. In addition to the happenings in the camp many of the displays recounted individual stories. It was particularly harrowing to see photographs of healthy men and women and read how their lives ended at Dachau.

From the museum we visited the ‘Bunker’, the camp’s prison where important prisoners were kept and others were punished and murdered, either in the cells or in the prison yard. A particularly cruel form of punishment was pole hanging whereby prisoners were hung by their wrists from a beam, the pain often added to by the guards.

'Bunker Corridor With Cells on Each Side

It was a somber journey back to Mabel, neither of us saying very much for quite a while and then reflecting on how human beings could treat fellow men the way they did. In particular, we couldn’t understand how the SS guards were indoctrinated to behave so atrociously.

Satnav found us a much better route home which was mainly on autobahn. I thought it was a good opportunity to see how fast Smarty would go. She got to 140 km/hr and still had more in her. She was steady as a rock but there was more wind noise off the hood. Jane thought 140 was enough and I eased off a bit.

We weren’t hungry when we got back to Mabel and made do with a cheese and tomato roll each.