Dachau

For International Holocaust Remembrance Day today I am including two pictures I took at the Dachau Concentration Camp outside of Munich, Germany in 2006. The first is the Gas Chamber (with the sign “Brausebad” or “Shower Room” on it.) People went in thinking they were going to take a regular shower with water and instead poison gas came out. The people inside then fought – literally climbing over the weaker ones to get to the fresher air at the top (in some Gas Chambers you can still see nail marks in the concreate ceiling of people trying to stay where the fresher air was for as long as they could.) Within 15-30 minutes everyone inside was dead from the poisoned gas. That is when the Sonderkommandos (Jewish prisoners forced by the Germans) came in to remove the hair, gold teeth and anything else that could be re-used off of the dead bodies before they put the bodies in the crematorium (the second picture.) 

Dachau was the first concentration camp built by the Germans in 1933. The US Army liberated the camp on April 29, 1945. An estimated 188,000 prisoners – male and female -  from all over occupied Europe (Political prisoners, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Catholic Priests, Communists and Gypsies) were held in the main Dachau Camp (there were 30 sub-camps of Dachau with over 30,000 more prisoners.)  31,951 people were murdered in the main Dachau Camp (that does not include the 10,000 prisoners made to leave Dachau on a Death March as the Americans were coming to liberate the camp – where thousands were murdered on the open roads or in closed Death Trains throughout Germany.) 4,000 people alone were burned alive in their barracks just a day or two before the Americans arrived to liberate the camp.

As Dachau was the first concentration camp it was where the majority of SS men and women learned how to torture (including doing human medical experiments) and murder innocent people. The methods created in Dachau were then applied to all the other concentration, labor and death camps throughout occupied Europe (there were 42,500 camps and ghettoes between 1933 and 1945. This figure includes 30,000 slave labor camps; 1,150 Jewish ghettoes, 980 concentration camps; 1,000 POW camps; 500 brothels filled with sex slaves; and thousands of other camps used for euthanizing the elderly and infirm; Germanizing prisoners or transporting victims to killing centers. Berlin alone had nearly 3,000 camps.) 

There were also 8 Death Camps (created only to murder innocent men, women and children): Auschwitz-Birkenau (1,100,000 people murdered from 1942-1945), Treblinka (800,000 people murdered from 1942-1943), Belzac (600,000 people murdered from 1942-1943), Chelmno (320,000 people murdered from 1941-1943 and 1944-1945), Sobibor (250,000 people murdered from 1942-1943), Majdanek (80,000 people murdered from 1941-1944), Maly Trostinets (65,000 people murdered from 1941 -1944) and Sajmiste (23,000 people murdered from 1941-1944) for a total murdered in the death camps alone: 3,215,000 from 1941-1945.