I'm happy it's been a few days since our visit to Dachau, because I might be ready to write about it at this point; on the day of, I couldn't really come up with the words to do so.
On Sunday morning we enjoyed our included breakfast at the hotel (I successfully ordered tea in German) and then headed to the Munich Hauptbahnhof station to catch an S-Bahn train to Dachau. It was weird to watch the schedule of trains and to see "Dachau: 3 min." as though that was a good thing.
Neither Drew nor I had thought about there being a town named Dachau, the reason for the name of the nearby concentration camp. It has about 40,000 people these days and appeared quite lovely as we took a bus through its streets from the train station. At one point during our audio tour of the camp, the "guide" mentioned that there had been a survery of the inhabitants following the war to find out if the townspeople knew or suspected what was happening right under their noses. The majority of folks pleaded ignorance.
The bus dropped us off right at the entrance of the camp memorial, where we picked up the audio guide and began our tour. The first thing to see was the area near the entrance, where recently the railroad tracks that delivered the prisoners as well as the road between the SS headquarters and the camp have been uncovered. The guide included prisoner testimonials of their arrival to this first Nazi concentration camp and the model of all that followed. Apparently it hasn't always been the case that visitors now walk the same route as the prisoners did, through the iron gates with the taunting and ironic message "Work Makes You Free" above it, beneath the towering guard house.
Upon entering you find yourself standing on the roll call grounds, where multiple times a day all the prisoners had to assemble. If anyone was missing, everyone had to wait until he was found, usually dead. From there we entered the museum, which is located in what was originally the buildings through which prisoners passed. We had expected to spend an hour or two at Dachau, tops, because it's not exactly Disneyland, but we ended up spending over two hours just in the museum, which is incredibly well done. It explores not only the history of Dachau, but also the rise of Nazism, the concentration camp system, and the lives of the prisoners from so many nations and religious and cultural backgrounds: before, during, and, for those who survived, after. You see all this while walking the same path they did, through the room where they were stripped of their possessions and logged in like items in inventory, through the showers where they were decontaminated and tortured, through the kitchens that never provided a sustainable amount of food. We were pretty drained just after the museum, but we were just getting started.
In front of the main building stands the memorial to the victims, in three parts. One is the famous sculpture by camp survivor Nandor Glid, part of the original memorial dedicated in the 1960's. There's another sculpture, which neither of us recognized, that shows the symbols that each prisoner had to where on his uniform, linked by chains. Finally the message "Never Again" in many languages is engraved on a wall above a capsule holding the ashes of many of the anonymous prisoners whose bodies were burned in the crematorium.
From there we walked over to the wall, which aside from an electrical fence, had a trench and a "kill zone" of several meters, where if you stepped in it you'd be shot. Apparently many prisoners intentionally crossed into the area to end their suffering. We were able to step through the gate and see the normal-looking road running along the side, where townspeople would have driven, right next to what had to be a frightening sight of machine-gun armed guards in their evenly-spaced towers. The image Dachau presented was intended to serve as a warning.
We then walked through one of the two reconstructed barracks buildings, envisioning how prisoners were packed in like sardines. The other many barracks were destroyed, but their outlines are clearly represented by walled areas filled with gravel. One of them was reserved for medical experiments on humans. A building toward the rear of the site housed a brothel where women prisoners imported from Ravensbruck concentration camp were brought to encourage productivity among the men.
At the rear of the camp are three religious memorials: one Protestant, one Catholic, and one Jewish. Each is beautifully designed, but the Protestant was my favorite, because it's designed without any right angles, in defiance to the Nazi tenet of absolute order in everything. It's a striking contrast to the stark, meticulously designed camp buildings.
From there we went to the crematoria, which was the most difficult part to tour. The first crematorium is the first thing you see; its capacity was too small, so they had to build the larger one, of course. In the larger crematorium building, there is first a waiting room, then a room to undress, and then the room with a sign "showers" above it, which leads, of course, to the gas chamber. Although prisoners weren't executed en masse using it as they were in others, it's still a horrifying place. Beyond that are the rooms where the dead were stacked awaiting cremation, and then the ovens, striking in their number, and more so because they still weren't enough for the masses of bodies. When there was a coal shortage the bodies piled up and they used mass graves instead. When the American forces arrived, they found train cars filled with dead bodies and more corpses in piles everywhere.
Around the crematoria are graves of ashes of the victims and the execution ground, where many were shot. It's actually a beautiful woodsy area, quiet except for the sound of birdsong.
We stopped by the Orthodox memorial before we headed out. The only bright side about Dachau is that the SS guards were imprisoned there afterward. It was difficult enough to be there as grandchildren of those who would have freed the prisoners of Dachau; German schoolchildren are required to visit the site now as a lesson. I can't imagine what that must feel like.
By then it was mid-afternoon and we hadn't eaten since breakfast. We picked up sandwiches, apfelstrudel, and butterbreze (a pretzel sandwich with butter for the filling) from vendors at the train station and set out on foot to the museum district. We had a lovely picnic and enjoyed the sunny afternoon before beginning our museum blitz. Our guidebook told us that all three of the major art museums were only 1 Euro on Sundays, so we decided to do a very quick tour of all of them over the course of two hours. Yes, it was ambitious. It also turned out that the Alte Pinacothek, the museum with the old stuff, wasn't discounted. We decided to go through with it anyway, seeing more Rubens than I knew existed. Then it was on to the Neue Pinacothek and finally the Moderne. We finished the day off by collapsing on the grass in the park for several hours, my feet having had more than enough. I napped while Drew took pictures. It was another early night, since we had to pack up and head to the airport for Sarajevo the following morning.
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