Hi all,
I started out the day by sleeping in, having a late breakfast and doing laundry. Yes, when you only take carry on luggage for a 2 month trip you need to do laundry (my fellow tourists appreciate the fresher smell!).
Then the second half of the day was somber and heavy but powerful. I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp with a guided tour group. The guide was so knowledgeable about all the history of the camp but told it it in a very real but compassionate way. This was my first visit ever to a concentration camp and the stories and images will always stick with me. I didn’t plan it this way but it was sort of surreal that I visited it on the anniversary of 9/11. Regarding both of these atrocities, may something like them never happen again.
Dachau actually was the first Nazi concentration camp (1933). We entered the compound just like the prisoners did thru the iron gate that read “Arbeit macht frei” which means “Work makes you free”. Dachau was more of a “concentration” camp used to gather together and isolate enemies of the state so they could not infect the rest of society. Other camps, like Auschwitz in Poland, were extermination camps built to execute people on a mass scale. All the prisoners at Dachau were classified and wore a colored badge denoting their crime against the state. Besides political activists, prisoners included homosexuals, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Gypsies, and Germans who tried to flee the country. A special badge, the yellow Star of David, was reserved for the group who the Nazis particularly loathed which were the Jews. Life at Dachau was horrific. It was a work camp where inmates were expected to pay for their “crimes” with slave labor. The work was hard, whether quarrying or hauling heavy loads or constructing the camp buildings. Rule breaking was punished severely, all manner of torture took place here. The tour guide described some of the most horrific things they did to the prisoners.
But once the war began in 1939, conditions at Dachau deteriorated. The original camp was designed to hold 3,000 inmates but quickly expanded to 6,000. By the time the Allies closed in around early 1945 the population had grown to 30,000 prisoners housed in 34 barracks. There were special cells built for the “special prisoners” such as failed Hitler assassins and people who challenged Nazism. They got the harshest punishment. Sadly they also built a crematorium which was used to burn the bodies of the prisoners that were killed. Their ashes and some bodies were put into a grave back behind the site.
About 32,000 people died at Dachau from 1933 to 1945. By comparison more than a million were killed at Auschwitz. But Dachau remains notorious because it was the first of all concentration camps and the one all the others was modeled after. The camp became a museum in 1964.
One of the pictures I included has a metal structure memorial built by one of the prisoners that depicts human bodies entangled in the electrical fences that went along the perimeter of the camp. After so much mental and physical abuse, some of the prisoners would just snap and throw themselves at it to end their lives.
Needless to say it was a very heavy and reflective day. But it is history and hopefully it never happens again. Take care.
Jeff
The Wandering Italian 