Our first morning in Munich dawned a bit drizzly and dreary, but nothing too dramatic. We can't have perfect weather all the time now, can we?
The hotel we were staying in was one of the few where we didn't take the buffet breakfast option (too expensive), so we found a great little place nearby where we could get a coffee and a butter pretzel for a grand total of 2 euro. Multiplied by two people, that's pretty darn good. I certainly enjoyed them.
And then we embarked on our first tour in quite a while - a walking tour of the former concentration camp just outside Munich, at Dachau. We almost got ourselves on a different tour by accidentally following the wrong person, but after a quick jog sorted that out. Perhaps the mistake happened while I was busily trying to take photos of the grand buildings at Marieplatz from underneath my red umbrella without getting either raindrops on the camera lens or the umbrella in the shot. Oh, and my sunnies falling off my head. I'm a multi-tasker, am I not?
It was a chilling experience walking through these gates, the same gates through which prisoners entered the camp that many of them never left alive. Plenty left it every day in work parties from which they obviously had to return. Can you see the words above the little door in the gate there?
In English, they mean 'Work will make you free'. Just a bit of sarcasm on the part of the Nazis.
This is the large yard on the other side of the gate, where the prisoners had to assemble each morning for roll call. Chilling is the only word for it. I was almost glad the weather was rainy and horrible. It would have felt wrong for the sun to be shining while we saw such a horrible place.
This is the entrance gate from the other side.
The wall at the end of this corridor (so to speak) was used for line-ups before they shot people.
This very large cell was inhabited by a guy who made one of the first very-nearly-effective attempts to assassinate Hitler. He was kept in comparatively good conditions so that at the end of the war they could hold a show trial as a form of propaganda.
Each of the cells in this building had what was at the time a very sophisticated form of heating installed. That in itself was for show, to prove to people who might come for tours through the prison block that the prisoners were well treated.
The controls for that heating were outside, though, and apparently the only time they were ever turned on was in the heat of summer. In the very cold German winters, nothing.
This is an original guard tower.
As we entered the museum, this map greeted us. All of the words on it indicate the various large-ish concentration camps set up by the Nazis. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of them.
The building that is used for the museum is the one they used to use to process new arrivals to the camp. This writing on the wall means 'no smoking'. Just another little Nazi joke. People are being stripped of all of their belongings and their identities, being shaved and deloused and treated like animals, but they definitely shouldn't smoke, it's unhealthy.
This is a copy of one of the original political propaganda posters circulated by Hitler. It translates as 'Your last hope: Hitler'.
In the time after the first world war Germany was almost crippled by reparations imposed upon them by the Treaty of Versailles. The government's response was to print more money with which to pay the reparations, but the result of that was excessively high inflation making the currency almost worthless. There are stories that people would wheel wheelbarrows of cash to the bakery in order to just buy a loaf of bread, and then someone would tip out the cash and steel the wheelbarrow because it was worth more than the money itself.
They managed to recover slowly, and were just getting back on their feet when the stock market crash hit. And Germany was once again plunged into despair. The graph below shows unemployment levels.
It was in this environment that an ambitious political genius like Hitler (because he was a genius, an inhuman, evil genius) comes out with youthfulness and confidence and a plan for a better Germany, and gained an immense amount of power and support within a very short period of time. The country just wanted someone to give them hope. And he did. For a little while at least.
Here's another 'no smoking' sign in the building, above an original desk that was used for processing new prisoners.
The view from one of the windows, out into the main courtyard.
This is the shower room. They had these transparent panels put up that have a picture from the time printed on them, that was taken from exactly that same position in the room.
This was what many of the prisoners looked like towards the end of the war, when rations were ridiculously tiny and they were being worked to exhaustion in the work parties.
Next stop on our tour was to visit the dormitories in which the prisoners lived. It was only the naughty (or special) ones that were kept in the cells we saw earlier. The majority of the prisoners slept in dormitories that were originally built for about 50 men. By the end of the war, some rooms had as many as forty times that many people crammed in like sardines.
The dormitory building below is a replica. The original buildings were destroyed.
These rectangles indicate where all of the previous dormitories were, since they've only rebuilt one to show what it was like.
They've rebuilt the dormitories based on how they were at three different times during the life of the concentration camp. This was how they started, when Dachau began as a relatively ordinary prison. Space for 50 men to have their own bed, shelf and locker.
It wasn't too long before they became this. Much more rickety structures where they would sleep several men to each level.
And then to this. The room was almost entirely bunk bed. No ladders, so the sick prisoners couldn't haul themselves up to the top.
In the years after the war, Dachau actually became a place for German refugees from other countries to live (since Allied countries didn't want to see or hear a German for a long time). The same buildings in which German citizens had been tortured and starved became kindergartens, schools, even a cinema.
It took over thirty years for ex-Dachau prisoners to kick up enough of a fuss to have the place turned into a memorial site, with the following message, in the four languages spoken by the various prisoners in the camp:
Each religious domination built a memorial. This is the Catholic one, built from stone quarried by the prisoners themselves during their time there.
And the Protestant one, built with not a single right angle, since it was believed that contradicted the hideous precision that the Nazis employed.
There were others, I just didn't get pictures of them.
Next we moved onto one of the most disturbing areas, the crematorium.
Originally, deceased people from Dachau were taken into the nearby town crematorium. As the rate of deaths increased though, it started raising questions from the townspeople as to what was happening at the concentration camp, so they decided to build their own crematorium on site, to take care of it 'in house', so to speak. This was it:
As time went on and things got worse though, it was working at full capacity, and the bodies were still piling up. Instead of perhaps considering a change in conditions to prevent the deaths, they decided to build a bigger and better one. Interesting logic.
This was it.
This building was also built to function as a gas chamber, although apparently it was never used to actually murder large groups of people. Nobody is sure exactly why that was. It certainly doesn't make the scenario any better, since Dachau was the prison on which many other concentration camps were modelled, including the one at Auschwitz that functioned almost solely as a gas chamber.
These were the holes in the wall through which the officers inserted the poison pellets.
This first room was the waiting room, where prisoners were asked to remove their clothing in readiness for a 'shower'.
The door to the gas chamber itself even had the German word for 'shower' printed directly above it. The memory of this is so bad that the Germans don't use this word anymore at all to refer to an ordinary shower.
The inside of the gas chamber.
And then the furnace room. These were apparently burning bodies non-stop, day and night, from the day it opened.
And they kept on burning until the Germans ran out of coal to run the furnaces with, as the war dragged on and supplies dwindled, and then the bodies just piled up outside the crematorium. It was in that state that the US forces who arrived at Dachau at the end of the war found the place. This next image is quite disturbing, so scroll down if you've got a soft stomach.
Outside the crematorium is a statue erected to honour 'the unknown prisoner', depicting him later on in life in civilian clothes, but still with a gaunt, haunted face. This place had a dramatic effect on us as visitors in just a couple of hours. I can't even imagine what it would do to a person staying there for years under those conditions.
This is the trench inside what was an electrified barbed wire fence surrounding the prison.
And now back to the spirit of memorial! The ex-prisoners that drove the re-opening of Dachau as a memorial site had that one very clear message: "Never again". They were all invited to submit entries to design the main memorial to represent the camp.
This was the winner, viewed from inside the museum.
And now viewed from outside. It was apparently practice that if anybody was to drop dead at the camp, fellow prisoners could not mourn, they were ordered by the German soldiers to throw them onto the electric fence. And so this was the picture etched in so many surviving prisoners' minds - black, mangled bodies on a fence. Certainly a powerful image.
So that was Dachau. Not much to be said now, really. The Nazis were monsters. It was both an awful, but an incredibly valuable experience. I'm so glad we went there. And may we all commit to ensuring that this kind of atrocity never happens again!
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