A look at Dachau

When mentioning the holocaust many people come up with images of Auschwitz and the story of Anne Frank. I knew that there were more concentration camps out in the area of Europe but I didn’t know that it all started with a place called Dachau. Dachau was a smaller city outside of Munich and was host to the first concentration camp in Germany. This camp with it’s over crowding, accidental deaths, and crematorium was the start of where many of the ideas for the final solution were practiced http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp . The camp had a very basic outline that keeps the prisoners in their secure spots. The layout of this camp was central around the Central Kitchen which was not really what it was used for. The planning of this camp was to keep total control of the prisoners and to not let them feel that they could escape. There was this large imposing building was where the prisoners were introduced to the camp. This entrance into camp consisted of a beating and the removal of a lot of their belongings. This was also to show the transfer of power from the inmates to the officers of the camp. A very define feature of the camp was the walls that surrounds the main barracks of the prisoners. AS you can see it was a relatively smaller area for such a large population of the camp but the SS still had 7 guard towers that would have been on 24 armed hour patrol. Along with all of these guards there were also the rows of barbed wire on the ground in front of the fence and a large cement ditch that would have slowed an escaping prisoner down. Theses massive containments clearly showed the prisoners that they were not going to escape and that the domain of there space was limited.

When Dachau first started it was just taking the German Political prisoners. Then the SS started to take Jewish people, homosexuals, clergymen, and immigrants into the camp. Most of the time these people never came back out of the gates. This would show how the Nazi’s were taking their national pride to a new level. The Nazi’s took pride in their discrimination because they were supposedly making the German race better and therefore a better Germany. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazism .

My time at the Dachau Camp was a different experience. I had been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. That alone was a very mind changing experience but that was just a collection of artifacts and pictures. Physically being at Dachau was a whole new experience. It was almost terrifying walking through the Central Building because I knew that this was where many of the prisoners were scared and knew that they were not going to return to the world outside of the camp. The largest uncomfortable experience I had was looking at the beating bench that the “deserved punishments” were dolled out on. It was sickening to know that this was an area where these people were being tortured and killed.

The feeling that were running through my body were dreadful but it was also very much of a life experience. It was giving a physical proof to the fact that such events had occurred. The Dachau camp was a very large reminder of why people fight to have human rights and keep things like discrimination in check. If enough people believe in something it can other achieve great or terrible things.