This is a compilation of my notes from visiting the Dachau concentration camp when I went to Germany last fall.

Dachau concentration camp lies just outside of Munich, Germany in the heart of Nazi territory and was the first concentration camp, serving as a model for all subsequent camps.  It was housed at an abandoned munitions factory and opened in March of 1933 initially to house political prisoners.  It was liberated in 1945 by the Americans who had a base there until the 70’s.  They were going to bulldoze it but survivors stood up to keep it as a memorial.  The camp and its satellite locations were set up for munitions slave labor as there was a shortage of Germans for these jobs.

Hitler really wanted to study art in Vienna (a watercolor of his was purchased for 390k by a Chinese collector).  He didn’t get in to art school so moved to Munich.  He tries to overthrow the local government and gets five years in prison where he writes Mein Kampf but ends up only serving five months out of the sentence.  His platform revolves around scapegoating minorities (and he gave out free soup for a little while).  Hitler becomes chancellor in 1933.  Shortly after a fire breaks out in Berlin and it’s blamed on the communists.  The Nazis fire decree takes away due process, if one is a danger to society they can be dealt with.

Upon entry to Dachau the prisoners were told (didn’t get it all), “you have no honor, you have no protection, you are shit, I am the devil”, and beaten by the guards.  They were flogged and had to count out their floggings.  If they missed a count they started back at 1.  All their cloths were taken away and they were given uniforms with pockets in the shirts.  If they dared put their hands in these pockets (even when it was freezing cold) they were subject to harsh discipline.  All their hair was shaved off in a matter of three minutes (which basically meant they were cut up a lot because nobody can shave one’s hair off in three minutes time).  This was to take away their identity as hair is a way people express who they are.  They were never referred to by name, only by number.   There was a specific pecking order for the different types of prisoners which the Jews were at the bottom of.  Women were sent to the SS brothel to be raped.

The prisoners were subject to various miseries.  They would have to stand at attention for hours in the freezing cold and one infraction by an individual prisoner would cause the whole group to have to stand longer.  Prisoners were constantly starved, living on 1,000 (and later 600) calories a day (we watched a film that was so graphic it wasn’t permitted to be shown until 2004; it made horror movies look rather tame, these people looked like walking skeletons).  Prisoners each had a bowl and a spoon and if theirs got lost or stolen they didn’t get to eat at all and starved to death.  There was an SS bakery next to the camp and the scent of the bread would waft to the prisoners standing at attention, a pioneering use of psychological torture.  Prisoners would get showers but the guards would turn them freezing cold and then scalding hot.  As they were coming in to breakfast they’d see their fellow prisoners up high on a beam tree pole hanging, a painful torture where one’s full weight is borne by their shoulder sockets.

Dachau has that famous gate (recently stolen) with the words inscribed that translate “work is freedom”.   Some prisoners tried to kill themselves by running over the barbed wire and electrocuting themselves on the electric fence.  The prisoners did get two days off—Christmas and Hitler’s birthday.  Every year they would release around 1,000 prisoners who could go back in to society and let others know what happened to you when you resisted the Nazis.  The Nazis were mavericks of propaganda; long before Photoshop they knew how to manipulate images.  To make a poster for casting prisoners in the harshest of light they didn’t just snap a photo, they waited to take it until a time of day when the sunlight was such that it cast more shadows on the faces to make them seem harsher.

Taking all this in I’m thinking, “I guess the Nazis were worse than I thought”.  And they’re Nazis.  They didn’t have much lower to go.  Amidst all this horror an exhibit that stood out to me was a map of all the camps showing the German companies (including BMW) that used the prisoner’s slave labor.  Like today’s companies they were all about profit and when Hitler came along and gave them a deal, letting them seize property of people the Nazis didn’t like and use prisoner slave labor, they weren’t going to complain.  Prisoners of different specialties would be matched with camps dealing in that specialty.  There was a lot of shuffling of prisoners between camps (where they were transported in horrendous conditions, basically train cattle cars where many of them died).  IBM sold the punch card system that helped the Nazi organize everything.  People’s skin was used for riding saddles.

There was a crematorium at Dachau that we got to see inside of.  It takes ten to twenty minutes to burn a human body.  By the time the camp was liberated there was a huge pile of dead bodies because the crematorium didn’t have any fuel to burn them.  In 1942 Operation Reinhard stepped up the extermination of the Jews.  Death camps were created in Poland specifically to exterminate Jews, 2 million of which were murdered.  Dachau actually had a gas chamber we got to walk through that supposedly was never used (Dachau was a prototype camp so they modeled the others after it).

People with disabilities didn’t fare well either.  The Nazis had a program called T4 where the disabled were sent to hospitals where health professionals killed them.  They were called useless eaters, people that were a certain amount of drain on society each year.  They would do medical experiments on the disabled and prisoners, for example making Soviet prisoners sit in ice water to study hypothermia or giving gypsies malaria.

There were 555 escape attempts at Dachau.  Even after liberation some prisoners died because of a typhus outbreak and many were so starved they could no longer take in food.

Inside gas chamber that supposedly was never used (I am not so sure I take the Nazis’ word for it)

Afterword

Later that day after seeing Dachau we went to Oktoberfest.  The CEO of BMW was actually hanging around right by our table.  I was so close to him I could have touched him.