The story of Dachau, as told to tourists

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The tour of the Dachau Memorial Site begins at the original gate, completed in June 1936, at the entrance of the former Dachau concentration camp. The prison compound was inside a large complex which included an SS Army garrison and an SS Training Camp. When the Memorial Site first opened in 1965, the US Army was still occupying the former SS garrison and the gatehouse building was being used by the Americans, so the entrance was on the east side of the camp.

The tour guides dwell on the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign on the iron gate, explaining how offensive it was to the political prisoners who had to look at it every day as they marched through the gate to their jobs in the factories just outside the prison enclosure. The gate is original, although the sign is a reconstruction. The tour guides explain that the sign was intended as a cruel insult to the prisoners who had to work with no hope of freedom because the official Nazi policy was "extermination through work."

Visitors are told by some of the tour guides that the SS guards sadistically taunted incoming prisoners by telling them that there was only one way out of the camp - through the chimney.

From their tour guides, visitors learn that one third of the prisoners at Dachau were Jewish. They mistakenly interpret this to mean that one third of the inmates who were imprisoned in the main Dachau camp during its 12 years of existence were Jewish, not that one third of the prisoners counted in the main camp and all the subcamps, during the last roll call, were Jewish. The last roll call showed that there were 67,649 prisoners in the main camp and all of the Dachau sub-camps on April 26, 1945 and that 22,100 of them were Jewish, while 43,401 were Catholic. The 2,539 Jews who were in the main camp when it was liberated had only arrived from the Dachau sub-camps within the previous two weeks and a few had arrived only the day before they were liberated by the Americans. As their tour guides describe the horrible conditions in the camp, the typical tourist envisions the suffering of these innocent Jews, not realizing that the majority of the Dachau prisoners were Catholic.

The Dachau Memorial Site was set up in 1965 by former political prisoners who were members of the International Committee of Dachau when the camp was liberated. These prisoners were anti-Nazi Resistance fighters from Belgium, France, Holland, Czechoslovakia, Norway and Albania or captured British SOE agents who had fought with the French Resistance.

The largest group of prisoners at Dachau were Polish civilians who continued to fight as partisans after Poland was conquered. As illegal combatants under the 1929 Geneva Convention, these Resistance fighters could have been legally executed, but were instead sent to Dachau and allowed to live. The information that is given to tourists today is based on the testimony of the International Committee members and the testimony of the Jews who had survived Auschwitz and other camps before being brought to work in the Dachau sub-camps.

The Catholic cross that was put up on the roll call square at Dachau, after the camp was liberated, has long since been removed, but a Catholic Chapel with no cross on it now stands at the north end of the former camp. A Carmelite convent just outside the camp can be entered through the door of one of the former guard towers. Some visitors are offended by this, thinking that it is an insult to the Jews whom they believe were the main prisoners in the camp.

There were only a few Jews who were imprisoned in the main Dachau camp before 1938 and most of them were released after they had been "rehabilitated." The majority of the 10,911 German Jews, who were taken into "protective custody" in November 1938 and sent to Dachau, were released within a few weeks after they promised to leave Germany within six months. Starting in February 1942, the European Jews who came under the control of the Nazis were all sent to camps in what is now Poland, not to Dachau. To say that Dachau was one of the locations where the Nazis carried out the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" is incorrect, although some of the tour guides mistakenly tell visitors that Dachau was a "death camp" or an "extermination camp."

Nothing is presented at Dachau that could possibly show the Nazis in a favorable light or cause visitors to have sympathy for the German people. No Nazi artifacts are displayed. Nazi slogans have long since been removed from the roof of the present Museum building and from the walls of the crematorium.

Visitors first go to the Museum which is in the former service building. They enter through the west wing which is where the prisoners were processed upon arrival. In the Museum, they see the former shower room where prisoners were hung by their arms as a punishment.

The photo below shows a bar across the arch in the foreground, which might have been used to hang a prisoner by the arms for punishment. Note the shower heads suspended from pipes on the ceiling. They were removed when the west wing of the service building was converted into Museum space.

In the Museum, a whipping block, that was used to punish prisoners for serious offenses like acts of sabotage in the factories, is displayed.

Visitors are not told that the whipping block was no longer used after 1942 when Reichsführer Heinrich Himmler gave an order that the SS men in the concentration camps were forbidden to "lay violent hands on the prisoners." Visitors are not told that the hanging punishment was originated by Martin Sommer, an SS officer at Buchenwald, and that this punishment was abolished at Dachau by Commandant Martin Weiss in 1942. Sommer was dismissed from his job at Buchenwald and sent to the Eastern front after being put on trial in 1943 by SS judge Dr. Georg Konrad Morgen.

After visiting the Museum at Dachau, visitors then proceed to the bunker (camp prison) which is located behind the museum building. Many visitors are outraged when they see that houses that were built right behind the bunker in the 1990ies; they consider Dachau to be sacred ground that must not be desecrated by people living a few feet from where the prisoners were tortured, according to the tour guides.

The interrogation room, where prisoners were allegedly tortured, was occupied from 1943 to 1945 by Richard Stevens, who was arrested at Venlo in Holland on November 9, 1939 on a charge of conspiring to assassinate Hitler and overthrow the German government. This was during the period of time that numerous spies and Resistance fighters were brought to Dachau by the Gestapo.

Visitors are not told by their guides that several SS staff members testified at the proceedings of the American Military Tribunal at Dachau that they were tortured by American interrogators to force them to confess to crimes that they claimed they had not committed. Johann Kick, the head of the Gestapo branch office in the bunker, denied that the prisoners were tortured; on the contrary, he claimed that he himself was tortured into confessing crimes that never happened at Dachau.

The SS wing of the bunker has been torn down and visitors are not told that Dachau formerly had one of the two prisons for SS guards who were convicted of mistreating concentration camp inmates. (The other one was the Danzig-Matzkau camp near the city formerly known as Danzig.)

Much of the testimony of the inmates was disputed by Dachau Commandant Martin Gottfried Weiss and 39 staff members who were put on trial during the American Military Tribunals held at Dachau in 1945, but visitors are not made aware of this. For example, there is a display in the bunker that shows the size of the "standing cells." The standing cells are no longer in existence, and both Johann Kick and Martin Gottfried Weiss testified that they had heard about the standing cells for the first time at their trial. The trial of the Commandant and 39 others is briefly mentioned on one small poster in the Dachau Museum.

Most of the tour groups do not visit the graves of ashes that are north of the Baracke X building. The photo below shows the grave of thousands of unknown prisoners that is directly behind the building. The second photo below shows another grave that is in the woods to the right of the Baracke X building as you are facing it.

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Blogger's Account of his visit to Dachau - external link

A visitor's impressions of Dachau - external link

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This page was last updated on March 17, 2008