German trip, day 3 part 1: Dachau

[theweaselking]

The first thing you see in Dachau are the walls and the barbed wire. Our guide, an Irishman named Brendan, began the tour in the first place the inmates would be brought. He stood over a wooden table and explained that in this place, you would first be stripped completely naked, given a number, and given some bare minimum clothing. This room also doubled as a torture chamber - the table he was standing in front of was a whipping block, the holes in the posts behind us used to carry attachment points for chains, and it was common for prisoners to be tied there, with their hands behind their backs, raised off the ground by their wrists, for hours. Because a person in Dachau had no legal recourse, no legal identity, and no-one to appeal to, the guards were free to literally do whatever they wanted with the "subhuman scum" with absolutely no fear of retribution.

This was our introduction to Dachau.

From there, we went to the barracks, with their models of how the rooms looked in 1933, 1938, and 1944. The guide emphasised that, in the beginning, all the prisoners were German political undesireables and cleanliness was an absolute priority. Imagined specks of dirt on the barracks floor meant whippings for the entire barracks. Prisoners were marched to the next-door compound to work as forced labour for twelve hours, marched back to the barracks and given starvation rations, barely enough calories to keep them walking for the next 24 hours, and then made to clean the place to an impossible degree.

Dachau was the model of the system - the first camp, and the one that all the others were based on.

Once the war started, the population surged. Over the next few months, Germans stopped being the majority, and political prisoners became less and less common in favour of social scapegoats and undesirables. The barracks were redesigned to make more bed room. The factory was closed - the workers were not strong enough for slave labour any more, and so Dachau became purely a containment camp. Satellite camps were produced, all around, to put prisoners who could still work to work in useful ways. When you got too sick to work the way they wanted, you went back to Dachau.

Dachau continued to grow, and to be praised. Other camp commanders were sent to be staff at Dachau, to learn the best way to run a camp.

By the end of the war, there were 30 barracks, each with 5 rooms, each room holding 400 prisoners. The beds had been redesigned to be three levels, with a single long bunk. Sleeping arrangements were that you were packed into the beds, on your side, pressed strongly against your neighbours, unable to move. Typhus and dysentery were common - all trace of cleanliness had disappeared. The strongest prisoners went to the top bunks - first, because they were still strong enough to climb, and second, because then they would not be subjected to the constant rain of bodily wastes leaking down from the upper bunks.

The Totenkopf SS were the pride of the SS. The elite. Being one of their number was not just being a prison guard. It was to be one of the finest servants of the Reich. They came from Dachau.

The crematorium opened to dispose of the bodies with two coal-fired ovens. It was quickly overwhelmed - it simply could not dispose of the bodies as fast as the prisoners were dying. A second building was built, and this one set up as an assembly line - at one end, a room for disrobing with equipment for delousing uniforms. At the other, a much larger set of ovens, capable of handling a dozen bodies at once. In the middle, a shower room whose shower heads were installed in blank concrete, with no piping or plumbing of any sort.

As the Allied forces approached Germany, prisoners in camps near the front were shipped to Dachau to prevent their capture by the Allies. Dachau was safe, in the heart of Germany.

It's unclear if the gas chambers of Dachau were ever used after the initial testing - prisoners were dying so quickly of typhus, malnutrition, overwork, and suicide-by-guard that the ovens were working full time simply disposing of the bodies of the dead from those, without producing more corpses through cyanide. Our tour took us past the memorials, to the gates of Dachau. Our final view of the place was the first view the prisoners had when they arrived - the Dachau gatehouse.

Arbeit Macht Frei.














The barracks, early 1930s configuration.






1940s - no better pictures of The Long Bunks available.






The barrracks site, today


The barracks site, liberation day


A map of the prison


The deadline



The original two ovens at Dachau






"Barracks X": The second Crematorium.


The entrance


A closeup showing the airtight chutes where objects could be dropped into the shower room.


"Shower Room"


Inside


Shower head


Behind the shower head. Behind that is bare concrete. No plumbing was ever installed, no capacity for plumbing was ever possible in this building.




The second set of ovens, built when the first were overwhelmed by the volume of the dying.




One of the memorials



The gatehouse

Comments

[eididdy.livejournal.com]

When I went there in '92, I had the strangest thing happen. It was a nice August day and I was walking along the pathway by the barracks. I realized it was incredibily quiet. Even the gravel underfoot wasn't making any sound. I looked over and could see the cars on the highway but couldn't hear the sound of their passing. I couldn't hear any birds or insects either. It's like sound didn't even want to go in there. One of the most unsettling things I've ever had happen to me.