Dachau

A hard day today - at Dachau Concentration Camp. It was a brilliantly assembled exhibition and memorial but a harrowing site to visit. Some of the site was reconstruction but it would be hard to know that without the presented information. In the prisoners camp, through a (replica) gate which says 'Arbeit Macht Frei', the maintenance building housed an exhibition from the end of WWI to the opening of Dachau, and then on explaining how Dachau was used, grew and changed over time before liberation on 29 April 1945, and the ensuing Dachau trials.

Beyond the reconstructed barrack blocks, there were Protestant, Catholic and Jewish memorials. At the crematorium, it was difficult to walk past the ovens and through the gas chamber (which wasn't used en masse in the way it was at other camps, but still). The gardens surrounding the crematorium had been made into memorials for the ashes that had been deposited in them.

We followed the Path of Remembrance back to Dachau town, this was the 3km route many prisoners were forced to walk to the camp.Read more