Dachau Things to Do

Try not to visit when school groups are attending. I say this, but it is impossible to determine when they might be there. We were surprised to find that schools were still in progress at the end of July.

If you see a large number of tour buses parked in the lot, be prepared, and avoid as best you can. I was disappointed to find the lack of respect given by the kids, especially the teens. This is not a typical site as such, a tourist destination of course, but it has questionable entertainment value.

Visiting Dachau was much like an extended vist to your local cemetary, however much more moving for the average adult.

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Spotted here and there, thick cement bunkers had been erected by the SS to defend against outside interference, and included gun ports facing inwards to prevent inmates from escaping. After sixty years, these bunkers are in surprisingly good condition.

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The entire camp was encircled with barbed wire fencing, leaving approximately thirty feet of flat ground running parallel with the fencing which was considered to be no-man's land. In addition to the barbed wire fencing, barbed wire was also strung knee high about eight feet from the fence, and a moat was filled with water, more barbed wire, and sharpened stakes facing inward.

Any prisoner found stepping within this strip of land was immediately shot to death by guards on the towers, and if a prisoner made it as far as the wire, then he was left to die as a warning to other prisoners considering an escape attempt.

Many prisoners commited suicide this way, finding life as it existed just not worth continuing.

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A 6x8 foot square unheated concrete cell, with a heavy wooden door, small peephole, and boarded windows, with an open toilet in the corner, shared with as many as seven other inmates on a temporary basis, sleeping in rotation...considered luxury by unknowing inmates in the general population.

Many of these cells were used as torture chambers, and prisoners would be left in the dark for days on end. Flogging the prisoner was a favoured past time, and the prisoner himself was expected to count each lash of the whip. If he lost count, or fell unconscious, the count would start all over. Tree or pole standing was another method of torture, where the prisoner was strung from a pole or tree by his bound hands, often wrenching muscles or pulling joints from their sockets.

Often the halls would echo with cries from prisoners being softened up by the SS guards, and a walk down the length of the central hallway was the last thing a prisoner may have seen.

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Built in 1942, the new crematorium had four additional ovens to accomodate the greatly increasing need, adding to the one heavily used oven in the old crematorium located just a few hundred yards away.

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Be aware that the additional pictures show the ovens in great detail.

Over 200,000 registered prisoners went through the concentration camp at Dachau, and out of those, there were 31,951 registered deaths. I say registered, because many mass shootings of Soviet prisoners were never recorded, nor were the forced marches of prisoners to locations outside of Dachau's gates.

These ovens operated at peak efficiency, and the overflow was later found buried in mass graves. At no time were the ovens used in conjunction with gassing of prisoners.

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The first crematorium built on the site of Dachau's concentration camp is located a few hundred feet from the second newer building. It proved to wholly inadequate to the demand, and more ovens had to be added to improve efficiency. Built in 1940, it handled 11,000 cremations alone until the construction of the new site.

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Gas chambers were included in the construction of the new crematorium, but were never actually used in Dachau. No one seems to know why. The design called for an 'undressing room', a 'shower bath', and a 'mortuary', and the shower heads which would be used to dispurse the poisonous gas, had 'NOT' been constructed with the required pipelines to order to make them functional.

This does not mean that inmates of Dachau were never gassed, in fact, thousands were transported to Hartheim, near Linz (Austria) particularly for extermination.

It is believed that an intentional design flaw may have saved hundreds, perhaps thousands of lives.