Dachau, a trip through misery

While we were staying in Munich, one of our side trips was a day trip to the site of the former concentration camp, Dachau. It really is a day trip, and worth taking your time to explore and listen. It's not as brutal as some articles have suggested Auschwitz is, but still sobering. It's about the only day we've not had a camera with us, and I strongly recommend this. Concentration camps don't seem like the sort of place to take a camera. Especially not to take happy snaps of the gas chamber, like one idiot with a big grin was doing.


The main way to get to the township of Dachau is via an S-Bahn from the Hauptbahnhof, taking around 35 minutes. From there, you can either catch a bus to the camp site, or you can walk along a memorial trail. The combination of being curious, as well as tight-assed, meant we chose to walk the 3km(ish) trail that the prisoners would have had to walk along from the station. It seems noone else chose to take the walk option, or at least we didn't see anyone. We're very glad we did.

This walk is definitely worth doing, as there is informational points along the way, and as it goes right through the middle of the town (and did at the time) it makes quite a potent statement, especially when later on you listen to some of the commentaries, where the citizens of the town stated they had no idea this was all going on under their noses. Apart from the forced marching of prisoners, and the work on the towns and roads the prisoners did.

Once you get to the site, you can do a guided tour for 3.00 EUR each, or pay 3.50EUR for a listening device. Apart from this, it's free. The listening device lets you walk through on your own time and listen to things in your own way (or religiously following the numbers if you are Rhiannon :P) You really need more than 4 hours if you want to listen to everything, but it doesn't seem to take 4 hours. Remember to take a hat and sunscreen.

There's not heaps left on the site - you can see the foundations laid out of where the barracks were, but there's only two barracks left (or recreated) and they demonstrate several different stages of the camps. It's when you get to the final stages that you realise how claustrophobic and overcrowded it would have been.

You also get walked through the old machine rooms, and the intake room, which have huge amounts of information on both the rise of the reich, the way the concentration camps worked, and a huge map showing exactly how many there were, and where they were.

Out the back of the museum was a special prisoners block, which even on a brilliantly hot and sunny day, was very very cold. The Americans used it after the war ended as a prison block, and I can only assume they put in lots of the mod-cons.

If you keep walking all the way down the bottom of the barracks road, across to the left and over a small bridge across the running stream, you'll find the crematorium and gas chambers. If you're silly like us, you'll go in the back end of the gas building, and keep walking through and not realise until you walk out the front door, that you've just walked through the gas chambers.

This area of the camp is probably where it comes home most of all - you see the rooms where bodies were piled, and you can visualise it all. To walk through the middle of the gas room is just freaky.