Today we took a train then a bus and went to Dachau.
We had a guide to take us through this concentration camp site and tell us about it’s history.
We heard it was started in March of 1933, which was before the war started, as a prison camp for political prisoners, like communist party members, social democrats and dissidents. The words on the prison gate say “Arbeit Macht Frei” which means “work sets you free” – our guide said this was propaganda to make the prisoners think that if they worked hard they could be freed, but most were worked to death. So sad to think of.
We learned that Dachau was the first concentration camp that the Nazis built. The prisoners were used as forced labour, even being loaned out to companies, like construction projects, brick plants, farming and even the BMW factory. And was the blueprint for the 140 “satellite” camps that were built in the later years of the war.
As the years went on and the war started the population at the camp expanded to included a broader group of political prisoners, jews and other “criminals”. And as the camp’s purpose expanded they added a crematorium, then gas chambers toward the end of the war.
Twelve years after opening, when the camp was finally liberated by the US Forces in April 1945 there had been over 188,000 inmates and 41,500 killed at the camp. How horrible to think about.
Our guide talked about some specific people that passed through the camp, some who made it out and others who didn’t. This gave some real faces to what we saw.
As we stood on the grounds that used to be barracks it was all so hard to even imagine what it must have been like to be a prisoner in that place.
The things we heard and saw were difficult but we need to know what happened here and as the memorial says, in five languages, “Never Again”.
Well Behaved Kids Travel 