Day 7 : Dachau

We checked out from our hotel and commenced our journey towards Dachau.  We were planning to take the “Romantic Route” towards Augsburg just to see what made the route romantic, however halfway through, we had to divert due to some road works.  All I could reason out why it was named Romantic Route, was because the route brought us through quaint countryside towns instead of dull highways.

The diversion we took led us via lake Ammersee.  The access to the water was more challenging than the other lakes we had visited the last couple days, as it seemed this was more a residential neighbourhood and access was more prioritised for bicycle lanes rather than for cars.  We stayed at one of the towns off this lake briefly for a drink and a short walk, before continuing our way to Dachau, and in turn Munich.

Dachau – the biggest known draw for this town is the Concentration Camp that was established by the Nazis in 1933.  It was intended to hold political prisoners, but was enlarged to include forced labour, the imprisonment of Jews, ordinary German and Austrian criminals, and eventually foreign nationals from countries that Germany occupied or invaded.

This camp served as a model for all later concentration camps and as a "school of violence" for the SS men under whose command it stood. In the twelve years of its existence, it was said that over 200,000 persons from all over Europe were imprisoned here and in the numerous subsidiary camps. 41,500 were murdered.

Current day, the Dachau site had been converted to an education ground, to share with the public the history as well as the monstrosity of the various acts that were done to individuals that were held in the camp, through abstract of personal stories shared by the survivors of the war. 

The 32 barracks originally on site had since been torn down.  However for the purpose of education, 2 were rebuilt to showcase the living conditions at that time, while the balance 30 barracks only had concrete rectangles in the ground marking the earlier site of these barracks.

The Dachau site contained a lot of information, and was too much for me to take in, though it left me heavy hearted when I left the compounds.  Mostly because of the shocking personal stories and the unimaginable acts of torture and images that were displayed in the various rooms. 

Furthermore, seeing the crematorium, which comprised of individual brick ovens, as well as an attached gas chamber that was disguised as a shower facility, so that individuals will be more willing to enter, not knowing that they will never come out alive, sickened me further. 

During our history lessons back in school, we covered briefly about Hitler and his rise in power and his acts against the Jews, but there was little coverage about the various camps and the details of the acts by Hitler and his men, as our history classes focused more on the Japanese and their occupation of Singapore during the WWII. 

The visit to Dachau was extremely informative and combined with the earlier visit in Nuremburg to the Documentation Centre, it allowed me to better put together pieces of the puzzle to the history of that time.