From our campsite at The Tent, we walked to the nearest tram stop, Botanic Garten to purchase the Munich XXL partner ticket which would be good to get us all the way to Dachau and back. The ticket also works as an all day pass on the trams and buses. You can’t simply buy a normal all day ticket as this will not be suitable to get all the way to Dachau. It works out a little cheaper to purchase the Munich XXL partner ticket as opposed to two single Munich XXL tickets if there are two travelers, then you can save a couple of Euros.
How to Get There
From Central Station
Take S2 to Dachau
Just outside the station you will find a bus stop (follow the crowds) take either bus 724 or 726 which will drop you off right outside Dachau (get off when everyone else does)
There’s no admission cost to enter the Dachau Memorial site, but at the entrance there are options to buy tickets for a guided tour. Alternatively you can purchase an audio tour for a few Euro. We were told the guided tour is really good, however when we arrived no guides were available so we went for the audio tour. Perhaps you will have better luck getting a guide. As well as having the audio tour there are numerous markers around the camp which detail in English as well as German historical points of interest.
There’s a short walk to the entrance and it’s from here you can see the remains of the train platform and a short piece of railway line used years ago to bring people to Dachau. From the train the Jour House stands as the entrance to the camp. Life for those who entered through this gateway changed completely. According to the propaganda the camp was supposed to be a place of rehabilitation and re-education, but in reality it was a place that meant giving up belongings, dignity and all rights as a human being. It was a place of humiliation and death. The words on the iron gate which read “Arbeit Macht Frei” or “Work sets you free” only further demonstrates the disturbing attitude at the camp.
The first location new arrivals visited at the camp is the Shunt Room. In this room the arrivals would be humiliated and often beaten during their registration process, given a number and then divided into a prisoner category. This process invariably decided whether a prisoner would live or die at the camp.
Passing through the camp gate for us meant walking into an open square called Roll Call Square. It was used twice daily for roll call of all the prisoners which also included the sick. Everyone had to attend twice a day and if the head count didn’t match the roster then everyone had to stand to attention for as long as it took to work out what had happened to those missing. The roll call square was also used as a place to carry out brutal punishments.
The barracks in the camp were originally supposed to house only 6000 prisoners, but the numbers were rarely that low. When American troops liberated the camp more than 30,000 prisoners were living in appalling conditions with the majority of those malnourished. Sadly further lives were lost as those too malnourished or sick did not live long past the liberation.
There are showings in English and other languages of a documentary in the museum area. Ask at the guide ticket office for the times in your language. The documentary is worth watching as it gives an insight into the reason the camp was opened as well as other background on the war. You will learn how Dachau was Hitler’s first concentration camp which also served as a model for future camps.
The Nazi regime wanted to create a politically, ideologically and social conform “Racially Pure” and strict hierarchical “National Community”. For those who chose not to integrate or did not fit in were excluded and persecuted. Initially the camp was designed to house political opponents, but by 1936 the proportion of Jews and non political prisoners increased considerably. Those imprisoned included not only Jews, but also beggars, asocials, returning emigrants, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and professional criminals. All had to where the mark of their category by means of a colored triangle of cloth on their clothing. Often homosexuals were the target of further abuses around camp.
The Museum area offers a wealth of information although some of the images are quite disturbing. After a while of reading it’s nice to get some fresh air outside as there’s lot’s of details pertaining to the brutality of the regime at the camp and there’s only so much of this we could read before needing a break from it.
A walk across the Roll Call Square takes you to the location of where the original barracks once stood. All that remains now are the concrete bases of where they where. You can enter a reconstructed barrack on the edge of the square which shows you just how basic and cramped the living quarters where for prisoners.
Walk along tree lined camp road and notice the guard towers, standing exactly as they did when the camp was in use. There are a total of seven towers all manned with machine guns monitoring the kill zone along the fence line. Not only would a hopeful escapee have to cross the eight meter grass kill zone, but also traverse the concrete water filled ditch, through barbed wire and then finally through the electric fence. As you can probably imagine people died trying. It’s been reported prison guards were known to beat prisoners and brutally force them onto the kill zone which resulted in them being gunned down.
The hardest area of the concentration camp to stomach for me was the crematorium. Just walking up to the building and noticing the chimney stack is enough to sicken you. It’s possible to walk through the crematorium from one end to the other. Each room had a particular purpose, the waiting room where prisoners were to be told how to use the showers, the gas chamber disguised as showers, the oven room where the dead prisoners were burned and the room where piles of dead bodies were kept awaiting cremation. We found out the gas chambers at Dachau weren’t put into use for the masses, but instead were only used to kill a few people at a time. This undoubtedly would have changed at some point. There were so many people killed that two crematoriums were needed in order to meet the demand. Both facilities were supposedly running at capacity until the coal supply ran out. The bodies were then buried in mass graves in the area surrounding the crematoriums. The most disturbing part of the crematorium however was reading how some prisoners were brought to the oven room and then hanged right in front of the ovens. The thoughts and feelings of these peoples at the time this was happening doesn’t bear thinking about.
Near to these mass graves can also be found the walls used to stand prisoners against for execution.
Located around the Dachau camp there are memorials dedicated to the tens of thousands of martyrs who died at the camp along with a memorial that simply states Never Again.
Our visit lasted for several hours and there was certainly more we could have read and perhaps seen, but in the end we decided we’d seen enough. Dachau is definitely worth a visit, but it might, like us leave you exhausted and somewhat somber after.
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