· Dachau ... and nothing else.Dachau, Germany · 25th Dec 2006 · Posted by Annie
Ok, it's time to blog about our visit to the Dachau concentration camp, the first Nazi concentration camp setup during the WWII period. You can click the link above for the official site but here's how I found it. Sorry in advance for the long post but it's worth writing about, as horrible as it is.
From the moment we got on the train from Munich it was a quite unsettling experience to know that we were going to visit the place where more than 30,000 people were executed during Hitler's reign. This knowledge is, as the title says, a very sobering thought as up until this point Dachau was just a name. In a little less than an hour it would become a place we had seen for ourselves.
The entry to the camp is run by a very friendly German guy who actually said "Kia Ora!" to us as we walked out the door after collecting our audio guides (portable audio devices with commentary on each point you're at during the walk around the camp). It didn't take us long before the audio guides were shoved into our backpacks ... they seemed pointless as the camp really does speak for itself.
I can only describe camp's atmosphere, and excuse me getting poetic for a sec, as unmuted savagery. From the main entry gate, a place where every murdered and mistreated Dachau prisoner had been, to the registration and prison rooms, more places where the most mind-bending acts of cruelty took place, the entire camp carried an air of sadness around it.
Every exhibit is accompanied by accounts from the prisoners themselves and stories by people who have written about the camp. The accounts and stories tell of disgusting human torture, medical experiments and outright murder that the SS guards didn't even care to disguise. Seeing the building the camp was run from is very scary to say the least.
The exhibition prison is a chance to walk through the 137 cells where the prisoners were imprisoned when it was deemed they had done something the guards didn't like. Tiny cells, some with roman numerals scratched into the walls. I assume these were from prisoners counting away the long days they spent in the cells.
From here we went and looked around the museum. The Lonely Planet guide book describes the museum as sobering ... it's sad to say they're not even close. Walking around the displays and reading about the events is enough to make anyone wonder what has to be wrong with a human mind to want to inflict this sort of pain on another person, let alone entire races or groups ... everyone knows of the desire to liquidate (yeesh, what a word) the entire Jewish race. This was referred as "The Final Solution" ...
The museum had photos of murdered prisoners - the weird sink-looking thing in one of the photos is where prisoners were tied up and subjected to hangings ... lovely. Some photos had even been commissioned by the SS. I interpret this as someone actually being asked to take the photos ... hardly a school project journal so you have to wonder why they wanted to document death on such a scale.
A 22-minute movie in the museum doesn't pull any punches when talking about the camp. It's a gut-wrenching account of death, murder and of mass graves holding thousands of bodies. All this goes along with more photos, some of the residents of Dachau being forced to look at the piles of bodies after the American liberation of Dachau in 1945. The looks on the faces of some of the observers is something to behold. Something like "God what have we done?" is written all over some of them.
The final part of the walk-around is the crematorium, complete with gas-chamber. On either side of the crematorium is a room, each named "Death room 1" and "Death room 2" in turn. This is where the bodies were piled before being burned. Photos all around the walls show the bodies in piles before being disposed of. One of the photos shows the ovens used for this. This was yet another time when the knowledge that you're standing on the spot where thousands of bodies have been makes your mind spin.
Then there's the gas-chamber. Ewwww. It was never used for mass-killings but it was used for murdering small groups and prisoners who looked at an SS guard funny. Fake shower nozzles in the roof and even a peep-hole in the door so the dying prisoners can be watched as they die. The shower nozzles can be seen in the photo of the bare room. So much could be said about this place but yeah ... that's enough.
From here we'd had just about enough so we wandered back to the entrance of the camp. We didn't say much. I mean, what can you say after being in one of the world's most famous killing grounds?
Sorry for the long account of something so gruesome and terrible but yeah.
Apologies if anyone doesn't really want to see the photos I've uploaded, no offense is intended to anyone.
Until the next post.
- Chris
From the moment we got on the train from Munich it was a quite unsettling experience to know that we were going to visit the place where more than 30,000 people were executed during Hitler's reign. This knowledge is, as the title says, a very sobering thought as up until this point Dachau was just a name. In a little less than an hour it would become a place we had seen for ourselves.
The entry to the camp is run by a very friendly German guy who actually said "Kia Ora!" to us as we walked out the door after collecting our audio guides (portable audio devices with commentary on each point you're at during the walk around the camp). It didn't take us long before the audio guides were shoved into our backpacks ... they seemed pointless as the camp really does speak for itself.
I can only describe camp's atmosphere, and excuse me getting poetic for a sec, as unmuted savagery. From the main entry gate, a place where every murdered and mistreated Dachau prisoner had been, to the registration and prison rooms, more places where the most mind-bending acts of cruelty took place, the entire camp carried an air of sadness around it.
Every exhibit is accompanied by accounts from the prisoners themselves and stories by people who have written about the camp. The accounts and stories tell of disgusting human torture, medical experiments and outright murder that the SS guards didn't even care to disguise. Seeing the building the camp was run from is very scary to say the least.
The exhibition prison is a chance to walk through the 137 cells where the prisoners were imprisoned when it was deemed they had done something the guards didn't like. Tiny cells, some with roman numerals scratched into the walls. I assume these were from prisoners counting away the long days they spent in the cells.
From here we went and looked around the museum. The Lonely Planet guide book describes the museum as sobering ... it's sad to say they're not even close. Walking around the displays and reading about the events is enough to make anyone wonder what has to be wrong with a human mind to want to inflict this sort of pain on another person, let alone entire races or groups ... everyone knows of the desire to liquidate (yeesh, what a word) the entire Jewish race. This was referred as "The Final Solution" ...
The museum had photos of murdered prisoners - the weird sink-looking thing in one of the photos is where prisoners were tied up and subjected to hangings ... lovely. Some photos had even been commissioned by the SS. I interpret this as someone actually being asked to take the photos ... hardly a school project journal so you have to wonder why they wanted to document death on such a scale.
A 22-minute movie in the museum doesn't pull any punches when talking about the camp. It's a gut-wrenching account of death, murder and of mass graves holding thousands of bodies. All this goes along with more photos, some of the residents of Dachau being forced to look at the piles of bodies after the American liberation of Dachau in 1945. The looks on the faces of some of the observers is something to behold. Something like "God what have we done?" is written all over some of them.
The final part of the walk-around is the crematorium, complete with gas-chamber. On either side of the crematorium is a room, each named "Death room 1" and "Death room 2" in turn. This is where the bodies were piled before being burned. Photos all around the walls show the bodies in piles before being disposed of. One of the photos shows the ovens used for this. This was yet another time when the knowledge that you're standing on the spot where thousands of bodies have been makes your mind spin.
Then there's the gas-chamber. Ewwww. It was never used for mass-killings but it was used for murdering small groups and prisoners who looked at an SS guard funny. Fake shower nozzles in the roof and even a peep-hole in the door so the dying prisoners can be watched as they die. The shower nozzles can be seen in the photo of the bare room. So much could be said about this place but yeah ... that's enough.
From here we'd had just about enough so we wandered back to the entrance of the camp. We didn't say much. I mean, what can you say after being in one of the world's most famous killing grounds?
Sorry for the long account of something so gruesome and terrible but yeah.
Apologies if anyone doesn't really want to see the photos I've uploaded, no offense is intended to anyone.
Until the next post.
- Chris
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