Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site

KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau

Since 1965, a memorial site in the town of Dachau, about 15 kilometres north west of Munich, has commemorated the Dachau concentration camp which was in operation from March 1933 until 1945. The memorial site was set up on the initiative of former inmates. At least 200,000 people from all over Europe were incarcerated at Dachau and its satellite camps, about 41,000 of them perished.

History

On March 20, 1933, Munich police chief Heinrich Himmler announced the establishment of the first National Socialist concentration camp in a derelict munitions factory in Dachau. On March 22, the first political prisoners, mainly social democrats and communists, arrived at Dachau. The camp was guarded by the Bavarian state police until April 11, 1933, after which the SS took over command of the camp. At the time there were about 230 prisoners at Dachau. In June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke commandant of the Dachau concentration camp. Eicke developed the so-called »Dachau model«, an organisational scheme for camp life on which all National Socialist concentration camps were later modelled. Moreover, Dachau became a training site for SS guards. In the following years, the SS also began persecuting Sinti and Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses and homosexuals. After the »Kristallnacht« of 1938, about 10,000 Jews from all over Germany were brought to Dachau, most were released however. Between 1937 and 1938, the prisoners had to extend the camp: 32 barracks to serve as living quarters and an administration building were set up next to the munitions factory and surrounded by 7 guard towers, an electric fence and trenches. In the course of the war, prisoners were brought to Dachau from all over Europe and deployed in slave labour in the arms industry. About 36 satellite camps were established in the area. From 1941 on, the SS conducted mass executions of Soviet prisoners of war. From 1942 on, Jewish prisoners were deported to extermination camps in occupied Poland. That same year, the SS doctors subjected at least 200 prisoners to medical experiments, an unknown number of which died of the effects. At the end of April 1945, the SS evacuated the camp and approximately 7,000 prisoners were forced on three separate death marches. There were about 60,000 prisoners at the camp complex when it was liberated by the US Army on April 29, 1945.

Dachau, 2003, Jewish memorial from 1967, Ronnie Golz

Dachau, 2003, The Catholic Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel from 1960, Ronnie Golz

Victims

The first prisoners incarcerated at Dachau were political opponents of the National Socialist regime in Germany. In the course of the war, the SS brought prisoners from all over Europe to the Dachau camp, including about 13,000 prisoners from Poland alone. Yet also Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, »asocials« and many clerics were incarcerated here. From 1941 on, many Soviet prisoners of war were brought into the Dachau camp. It is estimated that 4,500 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered in the vicinity of the camp. When the camp was liberated, about a third of the prisoners were Jews. Between 1933 and 1945, a total of about 200,000 people passed through the Dachau concentration camp; 41,000 people perished.

The entry to power of the National Socialists in 1933 heralded the state persecution of opponents of the regime, Jews, Roma – who were classed as »gypsies« -, the sick and many other groups. For the first time, anti-semitism became part of the government policy of a modern state and the persecution of all groups was progressively heightened. The process was characterised by the interplay between state regulation, violence from supporters of the regime and rabble-rousing propaganda from the press. The acts of terror against the Jews in November 1938 (»The Night of the Broken Glass«), culminating in around one hundred deaths, marked the prelude to the complete exclusion and murder of the Jewish minority. With the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, large parts of Europe fell under German control. In Eastern Europe in particular a multi-tiered system of camps and extermination sites was established, in which the SS murdered up to six million Jews, among them around 165,000 German Jews. It is estimated that around seven million Germans lost their lives in the war, including almost 3.5 million civilians. Around 28 million residents of the occupied Soviet Union (both soldiers and civilians) and three million non-Jewish Poles met a violent death. These groups are still barely commemorated in Germany. Germany came under Allied occupation in 1945 and 1949 saw the foundation of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) and the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG), who had very different cultures of remembrance. The GDR profiled itself as an »antifascist« state. The former concentration camps at Buchenwald, Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen became »National Memorials« and primarily documented the communist resistance during the war. In the Federal Republic, the dominant memory was initially of the victims of Allied bombing raids and those who had fled or been expelled from their homes in the former territory of the Third Reich. It was left to specific groups to remember Nazi persecution, the Holocaust or the resistance. With the exception of the war crimes trials, there was no public discussion of perpetrators or involvement in crimes. However, the situation was to change in the mid-1960s, when the statute of limitations for murder was lifted following a lengthy debate. Also during this period, memorial sites were established at former concentration camps (1965: Dachau and Neuengamme; 1966: Bergen-Belsen) and the German Resistance Memorial Centre was opened in 1968 in West Berlin. However, it was not until the 1980s that a diverse and often small-scale landscape of memory developed as the result of local initiatives. Following German unification in 1990, a national memorial site concept was developed and there was a major review of German sites of memory. The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin was inaugurated in 2005. The Topography of Terror, a comprehensive documentation of National Socialist crimes and perpetrators, has opened with a new centre in May 2010; the documentation centre »Flight, Expulsion, Reconciliation« followed suit in 2021. In the meantime, central memorials in Berlin have been erected to commemorate further groups of Nazi victims as well: the murdered Sinti and Roma, the patients murdered in the context of the Nazi’s »Euthanasia« killings and the persecuted homosexuals. The German victims of National Socialist terror in the former Eastern territories of the Third Reich were forgotten by both German states after the end of the war. For decades, memory of these victims was only preserved by West German associations for Germans born in these territories and it mainly excluded the period from 1933 to 1945.

Remembrance

After World War II, between 1945 and 1948, the US Army used the premises of the former concentration camp as a prison camp for Nazi Party officials and members of the SS. The grounds were handed over to the state of Bavaria in 1948 and a camp for refugees, later called »Dachau Housing Complex East«, was set up here. In 1960, the bishop of Munich, Johannes Neuhäusler, set up a chapel on the former camp grounds and in 1964, the Carmelite Convent Heilig Blut (Holy Blood) was established. The Dachau memorial site was opened in 1965 on initiative of survivors' associations, most importantly the CID (Comité International de Dachau), which had for years been advocating the creation of a memorial site. The »International Memorial« sculpture, designed by Nandor Glid, was unveiled in 1968. In 2003, a new permanent exhibition was opened.

Dachau, 2003, The 1995 Russian Orthodox chapel, Ronnie Golz

Dachau, before 1945, Camp entrance gate, KZ-Gedekstätte Dachau

Possibilities

Guided tours, readings, exhibitions, films screenings, educational seminars

Open

Tuesday to Sunday: 9.00 a.m. to 5.00 p.m.

Contact

http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de

info@kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de

+49 (0)8131 669 970

Alte Römerstraße 75
85221 Dachau

Dachau, undated, The »International Memorial« by Nandor Glid on the former roll call grounds, University of South Florida

Dachau, 2003, The Jourhaus with the camp entrance, Ronnie Golz

Dachau, 1938, Prisoners' roll call, Bundesarchiv Berlin

Dachau, 2003, General view of the »International Memorial«, Ronnie Golz

Dachau, 2003, Guard towers of the former Dachau concentration camp, Ronnie Golz

Dachau, 2003, The 1967 Protestant Church of Reconciliation, Ronnie Golz

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