We awoke this morning and decided to have Starbucks for breakfast. Better and cheaper than the continental breakfast offered by our hotel. We grabbed it at the train station where we caught a local train to Dachau. In Dachau we switched to a bus for the short ride to the Dachau concentration camp. We arrived about 10 minutes late for the only English tour of the camp, so we did the audio tour.
Dachau was the first concentration camp built. It opened shortly after the Nazi's took over in 1933. It served as the model for all concentration camps the Nazis built and it was the only one open the entire time of the war.
Between the 4 of us, we took lots of pictures of the camp. I'm only showing a few of the very poignant ones. The tour begins with the remains of this rail station just outside the gate. The train ended here and prisoners were brought into the camp through the iron gate.
Upon entering the gates a feeling came over me that I can only describe as a heaviness on my heart. Up to this point you can't can't tell the vastness of the camp. But walking through the gate you see the large roll call square where twice a day the prisoners had to report.
The 32 barracks where they stayed were all torn down, I'm afraid I can't tell you why. In the above picture you can see one of the reconstructed barracks. Here is a closer picture of the barracks.
The barracks were divided into 4 units, each was originally designed to hold 200 in each section, but by wars end held 2,000. Here is the bunk configuration from the 1933 time frame.
Each of the torn down barracks was represented by a stone foundation. That's a guard tower in the rear of this picture.
This is the view up the camp road. Can you just just image this road lined with 32 barracks?
We then exited through a back gate to the crematorium. Here is the ditch, barbed wire, and electric fence that kept them from escaping. Another guard tower in the background and another behind it.
Going up the short road to the crematorium we passed the Monmunt of "The Unknown Prisioner".
We walked a little further up the path and read a sign about the original crematorium. I then turned a saw inside the small nondescript building and my heart sank upon the sight of the crematorium.
Eventually the original crematorium was too small for the camp and a new building was erected. This building included the construction of the gas chambers that would be used at other camps, but apparently were not used here. It was simply called Barrack X.
Here is one of the mass graves where the ashes were buried.
We then toured the Maintenance building which was turned into a museum. This is where prisioners were first processed upon arrival. Then we toured the "Bunker" which was actually as Drew put it, "A prison within a prison."
I'll end the section about Dachau with this picture of one of the many memorials there.
We had only expected to stay for 2 1/2 hours, but was there almost 4.
We took the train and tram back to Munich.
And time for an early dinner since we didn't have lunch. We had dinner at this Biergarten, which is the third largest in Munich.
After dinner, we trained it back to the Marienplatz to see it at night. Even though the Christmas market was closed, it was still pretty with lots of lights. We walked through and looked in 3 churches that we hadn't looked in yesterday. They were beautiful! We visited two while the Christmas Day service was finishing up and got to hear the wonderful organ music.
Up tomorrow is Crazy Ludwig and two of his Fairy-tale castles!
I'll close today's post with this picture Kristie took of the decorated tree outside the glockenspiel.
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