DACHAU, THE PROTOTYPE GERMAN CONCENTRATION CAMP

Barry Williamson
April 2015

Introduction

Returning to the UK from Greece in April 2015, our route gave us the opportunity to visit the site of the former Dachau Concentration Camp in a leafy suburb of Munich. The visit itself is described by Margaret in the Travel Log:

By Motorhome from Slovenia to Ireland Spring 2015

On previous journeys, we had visited the two Concentration Camps in Auschwitz as well as the Extermination Camps of Sobibor, Treblinka, Belzec and Majdanek  along the River Bug in the far east of Poland. We had also spent some time at the Buchenwald Concentration Camp near the historic German cultural centre of Weimar and the Mauthausen Camp near Linz in Austria. But we hadn't visited the prototype of all the many camps the Germans used to intimidate, exploit and exterminate those, including their own kind, who they saw as enemies of the German master race.

The History and Purpose of the Concentration Camp at Dachau

The concentration camp at Dachau, 10 miles northwest of Munich, was established in March 1932, 5 weeks after Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. It was liberated by the US Army on 29 April 1945, a few days before Hitler's suicide.

In addition to the main camp, handling some 160,000 male prisoners over the years, more than 30 large sub-camps producing munitions held another 30,000 as forced labourers and German industry exploited as many as 60,000 more prisoners in over 100 smaller sub-camps.

Theodor Eicke, the first commandant of Dachau, went on to become the Inspector General of concentration camps in Germany, Austria, Poland and elsewhere. In this way Dachau became the model for all such camps, having developed techniques such as:

• arbitrary arrest without charge or trial
• mass shipment, usually by rail, to the camp
• no legal structure, no appeal or redress
• little or no chance of release
• providing free labour for German industries in subsidiary work camps
• the use of prisoners for work or experiment (for which German industry paid the SS)
• rows of overcrowded huts with tiered bunks
• regular and punishing mass roll calls
• uniforms and badges for up to 12 different categories of prisoner
• SS (Schutzstaffel) guards supplemented by trusted prisoners
• killing by gas chambers, shooting, hanging, physical punishments, starvation diet, insanitary conditions, overwork
• disposal of bodies in furnaces, mass graves and open fires
• using prisoners for medical experiments, such as the effects of: low temperatures, low atmospheric pressures, drinking sea water, long periods without food or water, and the testing of various drugs

Dachau in southern Germany was joined by other major camps: Sachsenhausen (1936) for northern Germany, Buchenwald (1937) for central Germany, Mauthausen (1939) in Austria and Auschwitz (1940) in Poland. All these concentration camps had many sub-camps and they combined forced labour with extermination. In a very different category were the camps set up in eastern Poland solely for immediate extermination: Belzec, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.

Rudolf Hoess, who worked at Dachau from 1934, was given command of Auschwitz in 1940 where he devised increasingly effective methods of mass gassing and cremation.

Dachau was initially for German political prisoners, homosexuals, Roma, Jehovah's Witnesses and dissident clerics; also Jews (after 1938), Polish Resistance workers (after 1939) and Russian prisoners of war (after 1941).

In 1944, a women's camp was opened within Dachau with the first shipment coming from Auschwitz-Birkenau.

On 26 April 1945 as the US Army approached Dachau, 7,000 mainly Jewish prisoners were force-marched to the far south of Germany and many died on the way.

The US Army liberated Dachau on 29 April 1945 when there were still about 43,000 political prisoners and 22,000 Jews. Typhus was rampant and had to be contained before prisoners could be released. About 300 SS guards were captured, some of whom were arbitrarily killed by the freed prisoners.

Overall, at least 32,000 prisoners died in Dachau between 1940 and 1945. Add to this the earlier deaths between 1933 and 1939, deaths at the sub-camps, deaths on forced marches and deaths from disease, malnutrition, physical oppression and execution. Countless more were transported to the extermination camps in Poland. In the years 1942/1943, over 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war were murdered by the Dachau commandant's guard at the SS shooting range located two kilometres from the main camp.