38. Dachau Concentration Camp

Today we both woke up aching a little from all the walking yesterday, so we decided to drive instead of bike to Dachau concentration Camp.

We headed into the camp and firstly stopped at the prison, it was very detailed when explaining the crimes which the Nazi's made against these innocent people. If you made it into camp prison, you were in for a very rough time. Towards the end of the war they even filled the cells with partions so they couldn't lie nor sit down and they would keep prisoners in here for days at a time.

We then headed into the main building of the camp , here it explained about how the camp was ran. Despite being only a small camp, they had 188,000 inmates. The living conditions were awful and disease spread quickly. It was already running by 1933 and ran up to being liberated by the US army.

We visited the memorial and the mass grave outside the front of the building, still felt sickening that this ever happened, was a really emotional day reading the individual stories. Afterwards we headed into the only block left which the inmates shared. The last stop was the worse bit, it was a visit to a Gas chamber and crematorium. This was really sad and felt quite unnerving to visit. The Nazi's had destroyed all records before the camp was liberated and have declined any evidence of the gas chambers really being used, but this has always been testified by the survivors. It is estimated that 44,000 people died whilst the camp was running.

Afterwards we started to head towards Bad Tolz, the van went into intermittent limp mode to add to the emotions, so we stopped and seeked advice with a garage, who managed to clear the fault and send us on our way. They did this for free despite being offered some money, was very kind of them.

We gave the van a run and it seemed to run fine so we carried on our journey, after stopping for the van services we headed to a free park up by a sports complex. We had a nice evening in the end watching "The Gentleman" on Netflix, definitely worth a watch.Read more