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Dachau
Concentration Camp - Dachau (Germany) |
Important note Photos provided on this website are not an endorsement of any political idea or of war. War is one of the most regrettable human activities. All photos on this page are copyright Robert Mary and may only be reproduced with my express permission. You may contact me here |
History of the camp On March 21 1933, Heinrich Himmler ordered that a concentration camp be erected at Dachau. This was the beginning of a terror system in Dachau that cannot be compared with any other state persecution and penal system. In June 1933, Theodor Eicke was appointed commandant of the concentration camp. He developed an organizational plan and rules with detailed stipulations, which were later to become valid for all concentration camps. Also from Eicke came the division of the concentration camp into two areas, namely the prisoners' camp surrounded by a variety of security facilities and guard towers and the so-called camp command area with administrative buildings and barracks for the SS. Later appointed to the position of Inspector for all Concentration Camps, Eicke established the Dachau concentration camp as the model for all other camps and as the murder school for the SS. The first prisoners were political opponents of the regime, communists, social democrats, trade unionists, also occasionally members of conservative and liberal political parties. The first Jewish prisoners were also sent to the Dachau concentration camp because of their political opposition. In the following years new groups were deported to Dachau: these included Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, members of the Jehovah's Witness, and priests. In the wake of the November pogrom alone, the so-called Reichskristallnacht ("The Night of Broken Glass"), more than 10,000 Jews were sent to the Dachau concentration camp. From 1938 onwards, the Nazi aggression that was now directed outwards against other European countries became mirrored in the prisoner society within the camp: after the Anschluß (annexation or connection) with Austria in the spring of 1938, Austrian prisoners were deported to Dachau, while in the same year prisoners from the Sudeten German areas followed, in March 1939 came Czech prisoners, and after the start of the war prisoners from Poland, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, and France etc. The German prisoners eventually became a minority; the largest national group was formed by the Polish prisoners, followed by prisoners from the Soviet Union. Overall, more than 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 states were imprisoned in Dachau. Besides maintaining the camp, in the pre-war years the prisoners were forced to work in various companies owned by the SS, in road works, in gravel pits, and the cultivation of the moor. In the war years the prisoner labor force became increasingly important for the German armaments industry. From 1942 a widespread network of subsidiary camps and outside work details was formed, in which well over 30,000 prisoners worked almost exclusively in German armament production. As Allied air raids increasingly endangered German aircraft production, the Nazis decided to relocate the production of important weapons, aircraft and rockets into giant subterranean factories. For this purpose, two large camp complexes were founded as subsidiary camps to Dachau: Kaufering and Mühldorf. At Mühldorf and, above all, in the eleven camps making up the Kaufering complex near Landsberg am Lech, more than 30,000 prisoners lived and worked in murderous conditions. These prisoners were mainly Jews from Hungary, Poland and Lithuania. In the course of the war, the Dachau concentration camp increasingly became a site of mass murder: from October 1941 many thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were brought to Dachau and shot. Other prisoners, condemned for execution on Gestapo orders, were transported to Dachau and executed. A large number of prisoners were abused by SS doctors for medical experiments; an unknown number of prisoners suffered agonizing deaths in the course of atmospheric pressure, hypothermia, malaria and many other experiments. Beginning in January 1942, more than 3,000 prisoners were sent to the mental home at Hartheim Castle near Linz on the so-called invalid transports and murdered with poison gas. Besides the 30,000 recorded dead, thousands of prisoners who were not registered lost their life at the Dachau concentration camp. They died of starvation, disease, exhaustion, degradation, from blows, and by torture; they were shot, hung, and killed by injections. With the victorious advance of the Allied troops, the SS evacuated more and more concentration camps, transporting the prisoners to camps located in areas still under Nazi control. On these transports, which often lasted weeks, thousands of prisoners died; they died of disease, exhaustion, malnutrition, beatings inflicted by the SS or, if it was no longer possible to transport them, they were simply shot. The prisoner numbers at the Dachau concentration camp rose drastically, and from December 1944 catastrophic conditions reigned in the camp: the barracks were hopelessly overcrowded and a typhus epidemic took the lives of thousands. Towards the end of April the SS began to evacuate the remaining 100 or so subsidiary camps and external work details. A large number of prisoners - the exact number is unknown - died during these marches, were killed by dive bomber attacks on rail transports, or murdered by the SS before the transports departed. On April 27 1945, around 7,000 prisoners were sent from the main Dachau camp on a march southwards. On April 28 1945, the majority of the SS left the camp, and a day later, on April 29 1945, units from the US Army liberated the Dachau concentration camp. Upon liberation
over 67,000 prisoners were held in the Dachau concentration camp,
half of whom were in the main camp. Location information The Dachau concentration
camp is located in Germany. The following map shows up a view of
all Nazi camps in Europe: Address: KZ-Gedenkstätte
Dachau From Munich with
the "S-Bahn" the
S 2 in the direction of Dachau / Petershausen At Dachau station the follwing Bus takes you to the Memorial Site: * Bus 726 to the
entrance of the Memorial Site ("KZ-Gedenkstätte") Link to the "Munich Transport and Tariff Association": MVV
München More information
on the camp can be found on Wikipedia here. |
Year
of Visit :
2007 by Quentin Deltour
|
