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Dachau, Germany
The town of Dachau used to be a flourishing artist community before World War II. Its name is now synonymous with the first Nazi concentration camp, which was built on the site of an abandoned ammunitions facility. The camp was originally designed to be a work camp housing about 5,000 prisoners, but by the end of WWII it was used as a crematorium and was extremely overcrowded. It takes about 45 minutes to reach Dachau from Munich. We took the S-bahn train to the Dachau station and then caught a bus. It was a cold and rainy day, but appropriate for a visit to this somber reminder of Hitler's tyranny.
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| Means "Work makes you free." This is the original gate to the entrance of the camp. | The administration office is the only original building at the camp (it now houses the museum). At the very end of the war, the Nazis tried to destroy all evidence of the camp. The open area was used for prisoner roll call. |
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| Each numbered empty plot is where prisoner barracks once stood. When the camp became a museum, two barracks were rebuilt to give visitors a realistic look at life in the camp (in background). | Nazi guards would line up prisoners on the grass along this trench. A tower guard would then shoot them from afar and they would fall into the trench. |
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| See Pam's ghost pictures from inside the crematorium. |
More Photos of Germany/Austria:
