Day 09: Dachau

Things I learned from our tour guide

	The entrance to the Dachau memorial. There is a distinction between a death camp and an extermination camp. Dachau was a death camp. 20% of the people, approximately 40,000 of the 200,000 who entered the camp, never left.
	Did this as part of a tour to make sure that I understood what I was seeing. Carlota did a phenomenal job. In an extermination camp like Auschwitz, 95% of the people who went in never came out.
	The camp entrance. The railroad tracks are for an ammunition factory that the prisoners were conscripted to work in. The concentration camps were not a secret. They were created in 1933 by passing of a law.
	Walking through the gates. Concentration camps were legalized and made widely publicly known because they were originally designed to hold the political opponents of the Nazi regime, specifically communists and social democrats.
	"Work makes you free" Or "Work makes freedom" Regardless, you get the idea.
	Prisoner barracks. It was later after Kristal Nacht that the Jews, solely for being Jewish, began being sent to the concentration camps.
	Many of the barracks have been torn down. After the war the barracks at the camp were used to house resettled Germans from previously conquered countries. Families lived in them.
	Foundations of barracks that no longer exist. When the entire camp was opened as a memorial in 1965, these family quarters were torn down so as to not confuse visitors with what they were seeing.
	Watchtower and barbed wire fencing. By 1942 Dachau became a labor camp to support the approximate 130 factories around the area. The German camp commander knew this was the opportunity to become very wealthy by selling out labor.
	Walkway between the watchtowers and the barracks foundations
	The crematorium. The crematoria at Dachau, as best determined, were used to incinerate bodies of prisoners who had died in the fields or elsewhere in the camps, as opposed to a deliberate extermination program like at Auschwitz.
	The most emotional part of the tour is entering the waiting room, where prisoners were stripped, then going through the door into the disinfectant room and then into the so-called "showering rooms", where the doors were sealed and the gas applied. Finally we walked into the crematorium room with the ovens. It's really hard to believe what happened there.
	Jewish memorial to those who died. The tears started in the crematorium  waiting room, and by the time I made it to the ovens, I was crying.
	The inscription says, "To honor the dead, so that the living remember"
	A barracks for 60, by the end of the war was holding hundreds and hundreds.
	The colors represent various oppressed groups, for example, political prisoners, social undesirables, Jewish people.
	A sculpture that memorializes those who threw themselves against the barbed wire rather than continue to go on in the camp.
	In short, may the example of those exterminated here show those who live how to live in peace.  Unfortunately, it hasn't worked out that way.