Reflections on a trip to Dachau Concentration Camp

Visiting any concentration camp in Germany or any other place in the world where humans were treated inhumanely does require quite a bit of preparation mentally. I can say after visiting Dachau Concentration Camp in Dachau, Germany that there just may not be any way to prepare yourself to fully understand the capacity of what was carried out there.

I tried to prepare myself before going to Dachau to not instantly be in a somber or angry mood. There is a certain level of reverence and solemnity that you have to constantly maintain while touring the grounds. There are a lot of stronger emotions that people exhibit as they move from building to building trying to understand the grand scheme of things. It’s a lot to take in and process.

I would say, maybe try to forget what you already think you know about Dachau or the Nazis, or the second World War before you go to any of the concentration camps. There is a lot of information provided by the curators of the museum through exhibits so maybe just try to absorb the information on site and form your opinion. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not trying to downplay the atrocities of the camps or the war nor am I attempting to ignore the impact that the entire period had on those held captive as well as the world. I am just encouraging you to go to learn and gain knowledge of Dachau and the war. We often see re-creations, screenplays, and movies about the camps (concentration, youth, forced labor, prisoner of war, extermination, etc) but I wanted to really get information from the source.

If you’re not familiar with the area, once you get off at the Dachau station you’ll walk out to the bus station and almost everyone is getting on the bus going to Dachau. You probably won’t miss your stop because there will be a large exodus off the bus which means you’re there.

I also encourage you to pay for the audio tour. I’ll say that the 3-4 € we paid for the audio tour was money well spent. It had all the information about the timeline of the camps as well as information about the usage of the camps. The part of the audio tour that left the largest impact was the survivors’ accounts in their native tongue. They have guided tours as well just in case you didn’t want to walk around on your own.

As you enter the main gates where “Arbeit macht frei” or “Work brings Freedom” is inscribed to where the barracks once stood the view opens up to a vacant area with numbered headstones marking each barrack. There are also the remnants of the armed guard towers where guards kept watch 24/7 in order to make sure no one escaped.

It’s very odd that the grass is green, birds are chirping, and nature has returned everything to the way it once way like nothing ever happened. Truth be told the ashes of thousands if not millions of people are buried on the grounds of Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site.

As I type these words, I reflect on the fact that Dachau was not a camp by any means and I’m now taken aback by how we often try to normalize tragic or traumatic events and periods in time by associating words that are less negative in tone like “camp” or “barrack” or “concentration camp”. We could instead say extermination or death processing grounds, but people tend to avoid the emotion of it all for whatever reason. Sometimes though we need to separate our emotions from certain situations in order to understand the underlying cause of why a situation exists and come up with a viable solution.

As we pressed forward, my sister and I tried to avoid the tour groups and went directly to barrack X (the extermination barrack).

As you walk the grounds next to the barrack, there are monuments to those buried in the graves as well as informational signage marking where the shooting range was. You could still see the bullet holes in the walls where people were made to stand and wait to be shot.

We then made our way into the barrack. It was basically a body processing facility. Stating it like that actually makes me want to throw up but it’s the truth.

People were made to enter in one entrance then take off your clothes to be decontaminated then stay in a waiting room waiting to enter the next room which was the “showers”. If you walk around the outside of the building before you enter, you can see the chute just on the other side of the wall to the “showers” where the poison gas tabs of Zyklon B were inserted to “cleanse” the occupants of the room.

As you may know, the “showers” were not showers. I sometimes wonder if the word shower was used in order to, in a way, calmly trick those that would enter the chamber into the chamber so that there would be less resistance. The “showers”, in most of the concentration camps, were usually gas chambers that were used to murder large groups of people at one time. During a period of 15-20 minutes up to 150 people at a time could be suffocated to death through prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B). If you didn’t die in the chamber, you would be finished off by way of the gun.

I will admit that I could not physically stay in the gas chamber for long. Even though there was no threat of being gassed, my body in a way sensed the danger and would not allow me to stay inside. I have never had a panic attack before but it was like the feeling of having a panic attack along with claustrophobia.  I felt like I could not breathe and my chest felt tight. I started to sweat and even felt a little dizzy and confused trying to find my way out. It is such a small chamber for the large amounts of people that were killed there. I don’t know the fear and pain that was felt in that room but it still haunts the room to this day making all who enter recognize how real these events were.

The next few rooms were where the corpses where incinerated. The Nazis built a crematorium in 1940 because the number of dead had risen dramatically. Between 1942 and 1943 a second larger crematorium with a gas chamber was built to keep up with the pace. Often times, there were too many human bodies since the Nazi guards were killing the prisoners more quickly than the “processing facility” could keep up with. So, other prisoners would have to pile & store the bodies until the time was found to get rid of the evidence by burning.

After the intense experience of Barrack X, we made our way over to the memorials, mainly the Jewish memorial. The Jewish memorial is well constructed and meaningful. The ramp slopes downward toward the main hall which seems to correlate how many prisoners walked down ramps toward whatever killing method ended their lives. The ramp had simulated barbed wire on the top of the walls. You enter the memorial through another set of gates. Looking upward toward the main source of light into the memorial. There is a menorah at the top of the roof where the light comes in. Such darkness in which faith shines the light and gives hope. It also appears that the light is at the top of a chimney which to me seemed to correlate the crematorium and the souls being lifted up the chimney toward their faith.

We then headed to the main museum which was very informative about the classifications within the camps and how prisoners were transferred between camps. As I mentioned, we’re probably all heard or seen the stories of the Jewish prisoners of the war but there are so many other ethnic, racial, and cultural groups that were made to come to the camps where most of their lives ultimately ended. The museum also provided information about how many of the communities around the camps appeared to normalize what was going on and kept to their own business. This sentiment may have been out of agreement with the regime at the time or out of fear of being anti-nationalist or fear for their own lives.

I also found it interesting that there really were a lot more camps than I had thought and each had a different purpose. Visiting Dachau made me realize how inefficient, financial ineffective and societally destructive war can be. In relation to life outside Dachau, it made me realize that there is hope in even some of the more dire situations in life that can bring some people out as a survivor and not as a victim.

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