My last entry ended with the club on Friday. Saturday I had a little trouble getting up at 7 in the morning. Turns out that German beer is a little more alcoholic than I thought. I grabbed my camera, and got on the U-bahn to meet a group of fellow classmates at the Hauptbahnhof for our trip to Dachau.
The train ride was surprisingly short; it was no more than an hour long. The train was packed, with very few empty seats. The bus ride was even worse, with people squeezed so close into the vehicle that I thought the doors might burst open if someone sneezed.
The overall feeling that I got from the concentration camp was eerily ominous. People sometimes describe that feeling when the hairs on the back of the neck stand up, and this was definitely that feeling. We walked into the gate with the inscription, “Arbeit macht frei”, which means, ” Work makes free(dom)”. We were able to walk through the barracks, the courtyards, the gas chambers, the crematoriums, and the monuments. It was really spooky at times, to imagine so many people passing through the doors.
I actually learned a ton from this tour. Dachau was actually the first concentration camp constructed, and it served as a model for the other camps. At first, the camp was designed to generally scare the public into submission. Any off-color joke or cartoon against the Nazi party would send you to Dachau for re-education. This meant torture and cruelty, but after the prisoners were sufficiently tormented, they were released into the public to encourage Nazi cooperation. If they didn’t, they were sent right back.
After the start of the Second World War, the camp was used to punish political opponents and prisoners of war. They were put to work under harsh conditions and were treated extremely unjustly. At this time, these prisoners were working on manufacturing materials for the war effort. As time went on, however, concentration camps went from being a prison, to a killing factory. Shootings and hangings came first, but it was quickly realized that poisonous gas and cremation were much faster methods of killing. Despite this, Dachau still relied on harsh conditions and diseases for killing the most people. Camps like Auswitz, for example, were constructed solely for the purpose of killing.
So today, the buildings and monuments stand as reminders for what evils lie within human beings, and a promise that these events won’t happen again. I took lots of photos.
We ended up staying for several hours. I’m starting to really like museums. I’m always interested in imagining what life was like then, and how fortunate I am to have been born at the right time and right place.
Guten Nacht!
Tom Ziebro