Dachau

We spent our second day at Dachau. Dachau is about half an hour from Munich city centre, so it's really easy to get to on the train.

We went mainly to see the Concentration Camp, but we wanted to spend some time in the actual town also. A lot of people come and visit the camp and then leave, which isn't really fair to the citizens since no-one will remember anything good about their town! And it's such a lovely town, most things were closed on the Saturday we went, so the town was really quiet.

It's hard to describe the camp itself. We've been to the Holocaust Exhibition at the London War Museum, which I think was actually worse. But in a different way. The exhibition showed you everything from all the camps, so you saw things from Auschwitz which was much worse than Dachau. Dachau however, was actually the first camp, and the model for all the camps that followed. It was where they sent political prisoners at first.

What is creepy is that it is literally a 10 minute walk from the town. There is NO way that the people didn't know at least some part of what was going on in the camp, and they covered that in the audio tour we took. It showed most people thought there was something not right about the camp, but didn't do anything. What is also disturbing is that the camp is surrounded by really pretty scenery, trees and flowers. The crematorium is in a big wooded area, almost like a park.

When you first walk in, you walk into the yard where they did roll call everyday. It's such a huge area, they kept 30,000 people there at one time. The actual camp was only built to hold 6,000, so they crammed 400 people into each room, you can see how tiny the rooms are below. It was just so awful being there because you could imagine it. They showed a film with footage from the camp, so you could see people dying right where you were standing.

You could walk right into the crematorium and the gas chambers. I walked in from the wrong side, and didn't realise I was in the gas chamber at first, but you could tell that there was something not right about the room, it just didn't feel right. They don't have any proof that they killed large groups of people in the gas chambers, but they definitely used them to kill single people and smaller groups.

There was a path that leads from the crematorium, and it's a really pretty wooded path, and then you'd come across a plaque that says 'Execution Range' and 'Mass Grave'. It's just so awful to imagine that happening in such beautiful surroundings, that made it much worse somehow.

So we spent a few hours at the camp, then wandered through the city. We didn't want to leave with such awful memories and I'm glad we took the time to further explore the city. They have an amazing castle that overlooks the town, we sat up there just looking over the city for a while then took the train back to Munich.

Was such an incredible day, I'm glad we went to the camp, because no-one should ever forget what happened.

Arbeit Macht Frei means 'Work Brings Freedom'. Nazis were dicks.

Roll call grounds. Prisoners were made to stand here for hours on end, even in the freezing cold.

The bathhouse where prisoners were washed upon arrival after being forced to hand over all their clothes and belongings

Some horrific images from the camp. The photo on the left shows the last death march before the camp was liberated. The man in the right hand photo was killed by medical experimentation