You Go Nate!

NEW FRIENDS --- SAD PLACES

On Sunday there were two visitors to the church ward I was attending: Earl and Adrienne. They are Americans and members of the New York Harlem Opera Company! This opera company has been in Munich performing Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess" and Adrienne and Earl are both in the chorus. The posters for it have been all over town and it's playing at one of the big theaters in town. Adrienne is also a church member from Michigan, whereas Earl is married to a church member and is favorably inclined towards Mormons. They don't speak German but the missionaries translated for them. It was fun to talk to them about their touring experiences and whatnot. They said they had Tuesday off and were going to Dachau that day if I'd like to come along. "Well sure," I said. And so I did....


I met up with them at the train station where we bought our tour tickets and met our guide. With about ten other people in the group we headed off to Dachau and the site of the first Nazi Concentration Camp.

Dachau is actually a suburb of Munich these days and it didn't take long to get there. The weather was cold and windy with intermittent snow flurries. It was somber weather for a somber place.

Most people know the sordid history of the Nazi Concentration Camps, and if they don't, there are better places than Nate's blog to find out about them. So I won't go into too much detail of what happened here. I will, however, give some brief info about Dachau and some of the things I learned.

Dachau was the first concentration camp and the model for all the rest. It was originally built in 1933 to house political prisoners (ie: Communists, union leaders, people who spoke out against the Nazi party in general.) As the years went on it eventually became a camp for anybody the Nazis didn't like including Jews. In all but the final year, Dachau was a camp only for adult men. Women and children were sent elsewhere.

As prisoners would arrive to Dachau they would be led through the iron gates with the "encouraging" words "Work Will Make You Free"

The prisoners were sent to barracks that were set in many rows in the center of the camp. Today nothing remains of these barracks, but there are concrete markers outlining where they once stood.

In the early days of Dachau the living conditions weren't quite as bad as they would later become. Prisoners ate better, had tolerable sleeping space, were sometimes allowed mail, and sometimes even the ability to earn some money for their labor. This situation would not last, or course, and eventually the camp would come to be an infamously horrific place.

Here is a replica of the bunks inside the prison barracks. Originally the barracks were meant to house a few hundred prisoners each, but in the final years of the war over a thousand prisoners were packed into each barrack house.

In such cramped and miserable conditions, Typhoid and other diseases ran rampant and that was the main killer in the camp.

Escape was impossible. There was a deep ditch, a barbed-wire electric fence, a concrete wall with electrified barbed-wire atop, watch towers, and guard dogs. If any prisoner even stepped foot onto the grass boundary before the ditch, they would be shot immediately.

Also housed in Dachau were former SS soldiers and officers who had been court-martialed and sent here as prisoners. Also, all of the clergymen who spoke out against the Nazis were sent here and some were even given some space to hold limited worship services. Here is a hall of solitary cells where many of these prisoners were kept.

There was no real due process of law here and torture and murder from the guards occurred often. Here at this wall they would often execute prisoners by firing squad.

Of course, the bodies would have to be put somewhere, and so a crematorium was built to facilitate easy disposal of corpses. In the final few years of the war when the camps were over-crowded and the population diseased and dying, a new crematorium had to be built with more ovens and even a gas chamber.

Here men were oftentimes led to the ovens, hung at the rafters, and then their bodies burned.

Now, let me make a distinction: Dachau was not technically a "death camp." The camp was not designed for mass executions like Auschwitz was. When the new crematorium was built, however, it included a gas chamber though there is no evidence that it was ever used.

Here is the slot where tablets of poison gas could be inserted and transfered to the gas chamber.

And this is inside the gas chamber itself.

The camp was finally liberated by the US in 1945 and became a prison for German prisoners of war, and then it became a refugee camp for the people fleeing from East Germany. Finally, in the 60's it became a monument and museum for the Holocaust.

There are memorials throughout the camp today including this one.

As we left Dachau the sun came out and we had a pleasant trip back to Munich.

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