Dachau

I went to Dachau yesterday, which is the home to one of the first concentration camps started by the Nazis. What an experience. It opened in 1933 and originally housed political opponents of Hitler and the Third Reich. Over the next 12 years it expanded its inmates to include anyone seen by Heinrich Himmler and the SS as unfit to live, which encompassed basically every single type of ethnicity and religion on the planet. I took a train to the site and it was especially cold and gloomy that day, which was very fitting. It started to rain when I got there and I was thankful for the waterproof jacket my dad left me when he went back to Tucson. (Thanks dad). I splurged and bought the audio tour, which turned out to be a great purchase. It had tons of info and was a lot more convenient to use than taking a group tour. The camp itself had been used as a few other things by the U.S. Army after they liberated it in 1945, but in the 80's it was reconstructed to its original state and turned into a museum and exhibit to show what life was like in the camp. The survivors had a big hand in planning its development. They made it so that everyone enters through the main gate that they had to go through when they were sent there. It was an eerie feeling passing through that gate and looking around at all the guard towers that were home to some of the most cruel guards in history. They had the right to shoot anyone they wanted to at any time, without any fear of repercussion. Picking off random prisoners was apparently a common practice. When you walk through the gates you can see a recreation of the barracks the prisoners had to stay in. I walked through those first and learned about the living conditions the prisoners had. It's amazing that any survived at all. At the back of the camp there are now various places of worship of different religions that are in use and centered around remembering the victims of Dachau. To the left of those is the crematorium. That was easily the most disturbing section of the camp. It is the only part that was left mostly untouched at the end of the war. As you walk around the perimeter you can see a few sites where U.S. soldiers buried the ashes they found when they liberated the camp. The plaques all read "Grave of Many Thousands Unknown". There is also a wall in the back that was used as a backdrop for executions done by firing squad. Within the crematorium there were also other methods the Nazis used for killing people . One of the most infamous methods they used was to pack hundreds of people into a room that was disguised as a showering facility and then gas them. There were also the not-so-subtle gas chambers that were used for even larger scale executions. After the crematorium I worked my way back to the main building where the prisoners were processed. It has been converted into an amazing museum that is among the most informative I've ever seen. It starts out by explaining the origins of Nazism and how exactly the group rose to power. Lots of people don't realize that Germans didn't just wake up one day to find their country controlled by a madman. It was a slow process that progressively got worse over time. There were legitimate social and economic concerns that the German people had that made them turn to Hitler's political platform. Unfortunately it didn't work out for the best. The museum also did a good job of explaining the opposition groups that lost out and how they were persecuted by the Nazis after Hitler was selected as Chancellor. After the overview of the formation of the Third Reich the exhibit explained the implementation of the "reeducation camps" we know as concentration camps. They were disguised as labor camps designed for criminals who needed to be shown the error of their ways in order to be admitted back into society. This was able to pass due to the extensive use of propaganda by the Nazis. They carefully engineered the illusion that the prisoners were well fed and taken care of. Sadly, the rest of the world based their reporting on the Nazi news media's own stories. It wasn't until the first escapees published their stories that the general public knew what was going on. Also, as I mentioned before, the treatment of prisoners in Dachau started off similar to a typical prison, but slowly descended into the cruelty that was discovered after they were liberated. This is mainly due to Himmler and the SS taking over halfway through the prison's use. Later on the Nazis worked their captives to death, withheld food and sleep, and carried out medical experiments on the living. The Luftwaffe ordered such experiments to be done in order to determine ways to increase the survival rate of their pilots who were shot down. Some experiments included exposing people to malaria, having them sit in freezing water until they died (to test out equipment designed to protect pilots shot down over the ocean), and placing them in an air pressure simulator to see how much the human body could take while flying at different altitudes. It was all very sickening to read, let alone look at the pictures. The next part of the exhibit went in depth into the exact religious and ethnic groups were imprisoned and what reasons the Nazis gave to rationalize their actions. When I said before that it basically encompassed every single human group under the sun I wasn't exaggerating. Literally every single type of person in this world was represented with at least one person in a Nazi concentration camp. Obviously the Jews were a large portion of those imprisoned, but even people who could be categorized as part of the master Aryan race that Hitler wanted so badly were made prisoners in the camp if they were opposed to Nazism. The Germans definitely didn't discriminate in who they persecuted. They were equally cruel to everyone. The last part of the museum showed how and when the U.S. forces reached Dachau and liberated the prisoners. There were videos playing that showed all the bodies the Army discovered as they explored the camp. Most had wasted away to nothing by that point and it's amazing they held on for so long. The exhibit also showed the world's reaction to the atrocities that took place there. It's strange that such a thing could go on for so long without being known by the general public. Another thing that made the museum really good was its use of personal examples from prisoners who were taken to the camp. It told all of their stories and really gave you a sense of how terrible it all really was. These were people like any of us that were taken from their families and robbed of their lives all for some psychopathic vision of a racially pure world. I really hate to sound like a cliche high school history teacher, but I think everyone should visit a former Nazi concentration camp. It gives you an appreciation for the freedom most people take for granted.