Never Again (Dachau Concentration Camp)

Member Name: MykReeve

Product:	Dachau Concentration Camp
Date:	25/01/02 (1678 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: A well-maintained memorial site, Moving atmosphere, Informative and educational

Disadvantages: Depressing and upsetting (and therefore not suitable for younger children), The mid-Sixties museum is showing its age

Sitting on the S2 S-Bahn, heading west out of the Hauptbahnhof in Munich, there's an odd sense of mutual embarrassment. I clutch my Lonely Planet guide awkwardly, and am all too aware of the effort being made not to catch my eye by the man sitting opposite me. The fact is that any tourist travelling on the S2 out of Munich can only be going to one place - a place which has a terrifying and shocking past, but which is only a few hundred yards from a suburban residential area.

So, there's a peculiar awkwardness to making the journey there. Locals are embarrassed by their area's history, and you feel embarrassed about your desire to see it. You start to question why you want to see it - why you should want to see a place where so many thousands of people suffered and died. Isn't it embarrassing enough for the locals that a huge area of land on their doorstep has been kept as a memorial to the suffering that their nation perpetrated in the past, without the constant reminder of sharing their daily commute into the city centre with tourists?

I know that when I left for Munich, I had little desire to actually visit the site of the Dachau concentration camp, in fact, I had more or less decided that I wasn't going to. Why? Well for one thing, I anticipated the sense of mutual embarrassment, and secondly, I expected to be very upset and depressed by the place.

It was only after talking to some other tourists, who had come to the city specifically to visit the camp, that I felt that I ought to. It's unlikely that I would be coming back to Munich for a fair while, and I didn't want to feel regretful that I hadn't visited it.

HISTORY

Probably the most shocking fact about the concentration camp - something I'm ashamed to say that I wasn't aware of before visiting - was that it opened in March 1933, long before the Second World War started. Although the world was aware of the existence of these c
oncentration camps, and even what went on in them, no action was taken against Germany until the invasion of Poland.

Built on the grounds of a former ammunition factory, Dachau was the first concentration camp, for the isolation of "political opponents" to the Socialist regime. More than 200,000 registered prisoners entered the camp between 1933 and 1945 - more than 31,000 of them never left.

THE CAMP TODAY

Efforts have been made to keep the appearance of the site of the concentration camp unchanged since its closure in 1945. The large "Wirtschaftgebäude" building, which originally housed the kitchen, laundry and storage rooms, which lies along the eastern side of the site, has been converted into a museum. Immediately to the west of the building, an international memorial has been constructed.

All of the original barracks were torn down after the camp's closure, and only their concrete foundations remain. Two barracks (at the eastern end of the camp site) have been rebuilt, one of which has been filled with wooden beds to show how it would have looked when the camp was in use. Each of the barracks was built to house 208 prisoners, but camp records show that some held upwards of 1,700 by 1945.

At the western end of the camp, four religious structures have been built on the site - a Catholic chapel, a Protestant church, a Jewish memorial temple, and a Russian Orthodox church.

The electrified barbed-wire fence that surrounded the camp has been largely retained, as has the huge wall. However, the ditch around the camp has been filled in, apart from in a few areas.

VISITING THE CAMP

You enter the camp through the northeast corner of the camp site, passing a guard tower. A little further inside the camp, on the north side, a section of the ditch that originally surrounded the camp site has been redug, alongside one of the watchtowers.

- MUSEUM

The first port
of call for most visitors is the museum in the former Wirtschaftgebäude. The museum was opened in the mid-Sixties, and is showing its age. By far the majority of the exhibition consists of photoenlarged photographs and documents, which are generally accompanied by a line of explanatory text in English, French, German, Italian and Russian. Many of the documents show evidence of wear where numerous visitors and tour guides have pointed out details, often making it difficult to see what was actually being pointed out.

Unfortunately, there is no translation provided of the documents, which are invariably written in German. A guidebook is available at a small desk at the beginning of the exhibition, containing reproductions of all of the exhibits in the exhibition, along with English translations. The guidebook costs 13 Euros (about £8), which goes to the Survivors' Association of Dachau. A plan of the site is available separately for 0.50 Euros (30p).

When I visited the camp, in January 2002, the museum was in the process of being renovated to reopen in 2003. As a result, only the first half of the museum was actually open. This part of the museum dealt with the seizure of power by the Nazis in the early 1930s, the establishment of the camp, and the persecution of the Jews. A room in the centre of the building chronicles some of the horrific medical experiments carried out in the camp. The second half of the museum (judging from the guidebook) would have dealt with the execution of prisoners, and the liberation of Dachau.

There is a cinema in the museum building that shows a short film about the camp in different languages throughout the day.

In fairness, the museum does make a fair attempt to objectively show what happened at the camp. Although the documents are impossible to read for non-German-speakers, the images on display speak volumes. There are some very upsetting images in the museum, and visitors are likely to be upset
by the content. Certainly, the photograph of a prisoner who chose to commit suicide rather than endure the horrors of life at Dachau is difficult to forget.

- ENTRANCE

The original entrance to the camp lies to the south of the Wirtschaftgebäude. The building itself isn't open to the public, but you can walk through the infamous gate to the camp, with its inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("work makes you free").

- BARRACKS

As mentioned above, the original barracks have all been demolished. Nonetheless, the concrete foundations remain, along with a small concrete plaque displaying the number of each barrack. The two easternmost barrack buildings, which would originally have been infirmary barracks, have been rebuilt.

The northern of the two rebuilt barracks is open to the public, and several of the rooms have been restored as dormitories and living rooms, as they would have been at different stages during the camp's operation. The first room represents the dormitories at Dachau in 1933 - each dormitory is designed to house 52 prisoners. The final room of the barracks shows a typical dormitory by 1945 - prisoners would have had to be packed into the long beds like sardines to accommodate around 400 prisoners per room.

Each of the rooms is accompanied by an explanatory passage of text, photographs, and quotes from some of the prisoners who survived the camp.

Visitors can walk down the long central path of the camp, between the sites of the barracks. The path is lined with poplar trees that were planted by the prisoners. As you wak along this path, you're aware of the stillness of the place. When I visited, there was next to no sound on the site of the camp - no birdsong or traffic. In a way, the silence was quite oppressive, adding to the intensity of the experience of visiting the site of the camp.

- THE CREMATORIUM

To the south-west of the site, just outsid
e of the wall around the camp, is the crematorium. I must confess, I didn't actually enter the building as it seemed a little too intrusive, although visitors can do so if they wish to. The building houses two large furnaces, in front of which a sign hangs, simply stating "Prisoners were hanged from here".

In addition, within the crematorium building is a large gas chamber, camouflaged as a shower room, which was never actually used. Instead, prisoners selected to be gassed were moved to concentration camps in the east.

The approach road to the crematorium from the main part of the camp is a singularly depressing, and upsetting walk. It's largely unchanged from the walk that thousands of prisoners must have been forced to make during the operation of the camp - over the ditch, through the gates, past some trees, towards the towering chimney of the crematorium - and it is probably the lack of any kind of explanatory sign that makes it so moving. I can't say whether other visitors are affected in the way that I was - certainly, many visitors seemed willing to walk through the crematorium building - but nonetheless, it's a sobering experience.

- MEMORIALS

Alongside the crematorium, just outside of the camp itself, is the Russian Orthodox chapel, built in 1995. It's a beautiful little chapel, with bare wooden walls, topped by a large onion-shaped spire.

In the south-east corner of the camp is the Protestant Memorial Church, built in 1965, a stark concrete building. To the north of this, at the western end of the main path through the camp, is the Catholic Chapel, built in 1960. The Catholic Chapel has been constructed from rough stones, in a "C" shape, with a separate short bell tower to the east.

To the north of this is the Jewish Memorial Temple, also built in 1965. The Jewish Temple is very dark, approached by descending a sloping walkway from the east, with fences in the s
hape of twisted barbed wire on either side.

Around the Wirtschaftgebäude, there are several memorials. The most obvious of these is the International Memorial, built in 1968, which stands to the west of the building - at the eastern end of the main path through the camp. It's a very modern memorial, in terms of appearance, reminiscent of the work of Picasso, with contorted long-limbed bodies, standing above the inscription "1933 - 1945".

To the south of this is a monument bearing an inscription in German, English, French and Russian - "May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1939 - 1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow man".

To the north is a stark monument bearing a simple inscription in Yiddish, German, English, French and Russian - "NEVER AGAIN".

GETTING THERE

To get to Dachau, your main choice is whether you want to go on an organised trip, or make your own way there. Regular organised trips leave from the Hauptbahnhof each day, and are organised by Radius Tours (their office is in the Hauptbahnhof itself) and Autobus Oberbayern (their office is on Arnulfstrasse, opposite the northern entrance to the Hauptbahnhof). Organised tours include travel to and from the camp, as well as an English guided tour of the site.

If you decide to make your own way there, as I did, you have to take the S2 S-Bahn out of the city towards Petershausen. Get off the S-Bahn at Dachau, and take the 726 bus (Monday to Friday) or the 724 bus (weekends) from just outside the station to "KZ-Gedanstätte". The bus leaves the stop just outside Dachau station about three or four minutes after the S-Bahn arrives, and the journey costs 1 Euro each way - although your journey to Dachau on the S-Bahn is covered by an "XXL" Tageskarte, the bus journey is not.

There are English
guided tours, organised by the site, at 12.30pm each day. The cinema shows the film about the camp in English at 11.30am and 3.30pm each day. Admission to the site is free. The camp is open from 9am to 5pm every day except Mondays.

CONCLUSIONS

It's difficult to really to describe the atmosphere of the site of the former concentration camp at Dachau. I found it to still have a surprisingly oppressive atmosphere, due to the surprising silence throughout the site. The weather in Munich in January added to the atmosphere - providing a light covering of snow, and making everything look uniformly grey.

It's certainly something that's worth seeing if you're in Munich for any period of time, and visiting the site is a very moving experience. Note, though, that both the site itself and the Lonely Planet guide recommend that a visit to the concentration camp is unsuitable for children under 12.

In many ways, the museum was something of a disappointment, mainly because of the lack of translation throughout. I assume that this is something that will be redressed in the new museum that is scheduled to open in 2003. Nonetheless, the guidebook provides full translations, and is well worth the cost, serving as a moving reminder of a visit to a place where so much terror took place.

= NEVER AGAIN = 1939 - 1945 =

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