Dachau Concentration Camp: Where Horrible Story Begun

all photos taken by Euroangel

Dachau Concentration Camp, I was here last August 2006, seeing for the first time the mark and the memories of horror in this place. As we went around with my husband in this place, I was really feeling scared trying to imagine what and how life was here before especially for the victims of brutality and cruelness of the Nazis. I also bought 2 books wherein the full story of this place was written. I can't wait to read the book as we came home from here. That was really a very horrible story that no people can ever imagine why this brutality happened.

Please visit also my other site Travel and Explore Germany. I will be posting here more detailed story of the Dachau Concentration Camp.

you can see this shield near the car park wherein you also need to pay for parking

one of the buildings of the concentration camp

courtesy of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dachau_concentration_camp

Dachau was a Nazi German concentration camp, and the first one opened in Germany, located on the grounds of an abandoned munitions factory near the medieval town of Dachau, about 16 km (10 miles) northwest of Munich in the state of Bavaria which is located in southern Germany.

Opened in March 1933, it was the first regular concentration camp established by the coalition government of National Socialist (Nazi) NSDAP party and the Catholic Zentrum party (dissolved on 6 July 1933). Heinrich Himmler, Chief of Police of Munich, officially described the camp as "the first concentration camp for political prisoners."

Dachau served as a prototype and model for the other Nazi concentration camps that followed. Almost every community in Germany had members taken away to these camps, and as early as 1935 there were jingles warning:

"Dear God, make me dumb, that I may not to Dachau come."

Its basic organization, camp layout as well as the plan for the buildings were developed by Kommandant Theodor Eicke and were applied to all later camps. He had a separate secure camp near the command center, which consisted of living quarters, administration, and army camps. Eicke himself became the chief inspector for all concentration camps, responsible for molding the others according to his model.

In total, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries were housed in Dachau of whom two-thirds were political prisoners and nearly one-third were Jews. 25,613 prisoners are believed to have died in the camp and almost another 10,000 in its subcamps, primarily from disease, malnutrition and suicide. In early 1945, there was a typhus epidemic in the camp followed by an evacuation, in which large numbers of the weaker prisoners died.

Together with the much larger Auschwitz, Dachau has come to symbolize the Nazi concentration camps to many people. Konzentrationslager (KZ) Dachau holds a significant place in public memory because it was the second camp to be liberated by British or American forces. Therefore, it was one of the first places where the West was exposed to the reality of Nazi brutality through firsthand journalist accounts and through newsreels.