Some tourist attractions aren’t supposed to be fun or to be crossed off your bucket list. Some are somber and meant for reflection. The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. The Killing Fields in Cambodia. Hiroshima in Japan. And it’s not all Oktoberfest and pub crawls in Munich, but rather a place with history.
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For some, this history wasn’t so long ago. Germany was in a state of desperation, experiencing a financial crisis not unlike the one going on now. The people were looking for someone to help them. Unfortunately, they looked to the wrong person, a man who used the Jews, gays, and Roma of Europe as scapegoats for the problem.
With my high school European history class tucked away in the back of my mind, I boarded the S-Bahn from Munich Hauptbahnhof to Dachau, a concentration camp that once housed 200,000 prisoners. I grabbed a map from the welcome center and walked through the famous gates, which read “work makes you free.”
My Lonely Planet guidebook told to set aside at least four hours to wander around the concentration camp, which seemed excessive, but once I arrived I understood why. Even if you don’t stop to read every plaque or sign, it will take you an hour to walk the perimeter of the camp. But do yourself a favor and take in as much information as you can, no matter how much time it takes.
We all know what happened here between 1933 and 1945. Thousands of men, women and children were worked to death, shot, tortured, gassed and used for science experiments. You’ve all probably learned about it in school, but does it really make sense? I always told myself, “But that was a long time ago. This would never happen now.” But is that really true?
What I found hardest to believe is that people lived within walking distance of this camp. They may even have walked past it on their way to work, just going about their day. The images of the Allies forcing the Dachau residents to see the carnage is truly haunting. How could they not have known what was happening to their neighbors?
In 2005, I attended the National Student Leadership Conference with a thousand other idealistic young people who wanted to change the world. It was here that I first learned about the crisis in Darfur. I couldn’t believe that people were being killed on a daily basis but I hadn’t seen anything on the news. The worst part is that it’s still happening ten years later.
Genocide is something we’ve said will “never again” happen on our watch. But we also can’t continue to alienate the same groups that were targeted back then. What happens to our neighbors is our problem. Feigning ignorance is not acceptable.
After wandering around where the barracks once stood, which the government had torn down after the war, I followed the crowds to the most surreal part of the camp: the crematorium. I passed dozens of chapels and memorials from different countries and groups before seeing the real ovens that were used to get rid of the evidence of the atrocities.
Understandably, I had a lot on my mind, so I decided to walk back from the concentration camp to the train station. The “Path of Remembrance,” as it is known, traces the march the prisoners were forced to make from the train station to the concentration camp and ultimately, their deaths.
I’ve now been to the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, the National Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, and the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin, but none have stuck with me quite like my visit to Dachau. If you’re looking for one image from this post to haunt you, here it is.
Tips for Visiting Dachau
Tours to Dachau are easy to find, but for the cheapest option, do it yourself by getting an English audio guide. From Munich, take the S2 to Dachau. From there, the 724 or 726 bus takes you to the concentration camp gates. The memorial site is open daily from 9 am to 5 pm, but closed on Christmas Eve. Dachau is free to visit.
For more on Cambodia, Bosnia, Rwanda, Kosovo and modern genocide, I recommend Samantha Power’s Pulitzer prize-winning A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide.
I had never heard about Dachau before reading this post and the way that you have described your visit there is very sensitively and eloquently written. Memorials like that of Dachau are necessary to help us learn from the past and try to ensure that such atrocities never happen again. A very poignant article.
Thanks, Naomi!
Your post brought back memories of my visit to Dachau on an exchange trip in high school. I currently teach history, covering the Holocaust and the concept “never again”. My students are always horrified, when we move into our Africa unit, to discover that genocide still exists in this modern era. It seems impossible to imagine.
I haven’t been to Dachau but was to a similar camp in Poland (second biggest one back in the war times but these days there are not too many tourists there which makes it feel even more haunted) and it was a terrible experience! So was my visit in Bosnia and Armenia. I just can’t understand how people could have been so cruel to the others…
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll definitely look for it!