Germany 2013 KZ-Gedenkstatte Dachau

Wednesday, May 29, 2013
  KZ-Gedenkstatte was a concentration camp in Dachau during World War II.  We woke up to cold, rain, and wind this morning, which seemed appropriate to a visit such as this.
  The camp was used mostly as a slave labor camp rather than just a massive extermination site, though thousands of people did die there.  The prisoners here included Jewish people, Christian church pastors, Germans who did not support the Nazi regime, and prisoners from other countries.  The prisoners were basically worked to death (those who weren't murdered or tortured by the SS), and the dead became so numerous that the crematorium could not handle the load and some were buried in mass graves. There is a room where they experimented with poison gas on some of the prisoners, but there were apparently no mass killings with gas here.  When American forces liberated the camp on April 29,1945, there were over 200 dead emaciated bodies stacked up outside the crematorium waiting to be burned.
   Only two of the barracks that housed prisoners remain, but the outlines of the other barracks are there. The administration building, guard towers, a building used for holding special prisoners, and the crematorium buildings remain. The exhibits are quite extensive and there were many groups of visitors there, even on such a cold day.  It was a very somber place.