The story of Dachau, as told to tourists

Eight hundred thousand tourists now visit the former Dachau concentration camp each year. The typical tourist is a young student on a tour of Europe who has just arrived in Munich the day before and has spent the previous night visiting Bavaria's number one attraction - the Hofbräuhaus. Then it's on to the number two attraction - Dachau. The third big attraction in Bavaria is King Lugwig's castle, Neuschwanstein, which is next on the list after Dachau has been checked off.

Dachau is a picturesque town, located 18 kilometers north of Munich; it is a short train ride on the S-Bahn #2 line going towards Petershausen. From the train station, tourists take a city bus to the former Dachau concentration camp which is now a Memorial Site.

In 2005, a new entrance to the Dachau Memorial Site was created on the south side of the Dachau complex, which includes the former concentration camp and what is left of the former SS Garrison and Training Center. The photo above shows the gravel path from the bus stop to the gatehouse of the former camp. This is a new path that did not exist when the camp was in operation.

In May 2007, a new visitor's center with a cafeteria was under construction at the new tourist entrance. Currently, tourists cannot buy food or drinks at the Memorial site. For years, it was thought that eating at a Memorial Site would be disrespectful to the dead. When I visited in May 2007, I saw tourists who had brought food with them to the camp and were munching on sandwiches or eating from plastic containers as they toured the site. I had to remove a food wrapper before taking a photo of the gas chamber. The railroad station at Dachau is about two miles from the Memorial Site, but some tourists are critical of the McDonald's restaurant there because it is too close to the hallowed ground of the former camp.

Visitors to Dachau mainly arrive in groups and are escorted by a tour guide. At the entrance, recorded information is also available for self-guided tours. Young German students, who are required to take a tour of a concentration camp, also arrive in groups, escorted by their teachers. They look very subdued as they listen to their teacher's shameful account of the crimes committed by their great-grandparents.

Most students are apprehensive about visiting Dachau. They have studied the Holocaust in elementary school, and they arrive with pre-conceived notions. They are not disappointed; they learn that the Dachau concentration camp was even worse than they thought it was. After their pilgrimage to Dachau, there are two favorite words that young students typically use to describe their experience: "sobering" and "moving."

The Nazis kept meticulous records at the concentration camps, but not meticulous enough. According to a report made by the International Tracing Service of the Red Cross at Arolson, Germany in 1977, there were 31,951 recorded deaths at the main Dachau camp during the 12 years that the camp was in existence. Today the staff at the Memorial Site tells visitors that 41,566 is a conservative estimate of the number of deaths at Dachau.

At the end of the gravel entrance path, visitors turn to the right and enter through the original gate into the former camp, shown in the photo below.

Visitors marvel at the concrete-lined gravel beds that denote the location of the former barracks and the two rows of poplar trees which line the Dachau camp road. The tourists are not told that the original trees, planted by the prisoners in 1938, were removed when Dachau was turned into a refugee camp; the present trees were planted in the 1980ies and some have been replaced since then.

Originally, there were flower beds at both ends of the barracks. The area around the crematorium was originally landscaped like a garden and there were even fresh flowers in a vase in the undressing room for the gas chamber when the American liberators arrived.

The vast field of coarse gravel, which visitors see when they enter the camp, was added when the Memorial Site was constructed. This space was originally broken up by paved areas and paths lined with flower beds.

The tourists are told that there was a "sick parade" each evening on the field of gravel, where the sick and the infirm were beaten and ridiculed. Some tour guides tell visitors that incoming prisoners at Dachau were tattooed with a number on their arm, although this was only done at Auschwitz. Rick Steve's 2007 guidebook for Germany, which is generally reliable, tells potential visitors that Dachau was "a departure point for people shipped to gas chambers in the east..."

The barracks in the Dachau concentration camp were turned into tar paper shacks, divided into tiny apartments, which were occupied from 1948 to 1964 by 5,000 ethnic Germans who were expelled from their homes in the Sudetenland after the war. The 2,000 German refugees, who were still there in 1964, were thrown out of their homes again so that a Memorial Site could be constructed in 1965.

Unless visitors spend a lot of time in the Museum at the Memorial Site, they will probably leave without learning that Dachau was a refugee camp longer than it was a concentration camp. The photo below shows the only information in the Museum about the refugee camp.

Tour groups are not told that shoddy wooden barracks were built by the American Army in June 1945 when the Dachau concentration camp was turned into War Crimes Enclosure No. 1 nor that 30,000 German POWs were crowded into a space that was originally designed for no more than 10,000 inmates. Although the official US Army report stated that there were 31,432 inmates at Dachau when the camp was liberated, the staff at the Memorial Site now tells visitors that there were 42,000 prisoners in the camp on liberation day. Half of the liberated prisoners had been in the camp less than three weeks, but the German POWs were kept in the same crowded conditions at Dachau for three years.

The Memorial Sites at Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen both have a second museum which tells about how badly the German inmates in the Soviet special camps were treated after the war, but at Dachau, there is only one small poster in the Museum which mentions that German POWs were imprisoned there. The Museum poster does not give the slightest hint that the German prisoners were denied their rights under the Geneva Convention.

Information given to tourists about the gas chamber at Dachau varies according to who is guiding the tour. Some guides tell visitors that the gas chamber was never used, while others maintain that the gas chamber was used a few times. Some guides say that the gas came through the fake shower heads, but others tell visitors that gas pellets were poured onto the floor through two openings on the east wall of the gas chamber. Recorded information for the self-guided tour tells visitors that "not as many Jews were gassed at Dachau as at Auschwitz because Dachau was in the middle of a city." (Dachau was a village of 13,000 people back then and the camp was not in the center of the town.)

The official version of the Dachau story, since 2003, is that the gas chamber "could have been used" and in fact, "it was used a few times." The sign that formerly said in 5 languages that the gas chamber was never used was removed because some of the still living members of the International Committee of Dachau insist that the gas chamber was used. Even the guides who tell visitors that the gas chamber was never used describe the gassing procedure in great detail.

A film that is shown every hour at the Museum includes footage of the Dachau gas chamber that was introduced at the Nuremberg International Military Tribunal on November 29, 1945. Nazi war criminals were convicted and hanged, based on the information about the gas chamber in this film, which the defendants claimed to know nothing about. Visitors are not allowed to see the pipes and control wheels and push buttons that are shown in this film. Conspicuously absent from the Dachau Museum are any photos of the gas chamber, or even the front of the Baracke X building, that were taken before the camp was liberated.

The greatest shock to visitors is the ovens in the crematorium. Tourists are not told that the bodies were burned in an effort to stop the spread of disease, nor that the ovens in the Baracke X building were only used between April 1943 and October 1944. Half of the prisoners who perished at Dachau died in the typhus epidemic after these ovens were no longer in use because of the shortage of coal. Yet visitors are told by the guides that the Nazis were murdering the inmates as fast as they could in the last days of the war, knowing that time was running out because the camp would soon be liberated.

Many people mistakenly think that the ovens were used in the concentration camps as a means of killing the Jews. On the Hannity and Colmes TV show on 12/13/06, Alan Colmes mentioned the gas chambers, but then showed a photo of two cremation ovens at Buchenwald with the remains of partially burned bodies visible, as he said: "I want to put up on the screen the furnaces that were used to kill Jews." The cremation ovens were not "gas ovens" or "gas chambers." The ovens were fired by coke and they were used only to burn dead bodies. The small doors on the ovens were used for removing the ashes, not for putting live babies inside, as some people believe.

One guide told her group that the prisoners who worked in the crematorium were killed every three months in order to eliminate the witnesses to the "Final Solution." The Dachau ovens were fired up again by the Americans after the Dachau camp was liberated, according to Marcus J. Smith, a US Army doctor, who wrote a book entitled "The Harrowing of Hell." Smith wrote that the former crematorium workers, who were still very much alive, complained to him in a letter that the Americans were not treating them in the privileged manner to which they had become accustomed when the SS ruled the camp.

One of the most important events in World War II was the liberation of Dachau, but it is barely mentioned in the Museum. At the end of the Museum exhibit, there is one photo of an American soldier shooting SS men who have surrendered. There are no photos of the mutilated bodies of SS soldiers who were beaten to death by the inmates while the American liberators watched. These were soldiers who had been sent from the battle front to surrender the camp.

If tourists were told the whole truth about Dachau, few people would bother to visit the former camp.

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A blogger's account of her Dachau tour - External link

A Reporter's account of his Dachau visit - External link

Guided tour of Dachau - External link

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This page was last updated on October 12, 2007