München: Day 4: Dachau Concentration Camp

After the über-impressive Alps, today was totally different. Bianca and I visited the Dachau Concentration Camp memorial site. This was not a place that you rush through, and it made for an emotional and powerful visit. We stayed there for 3.5 hours, listening to the survivors' accounts and gaining a much better understanding of the structure behind the camps.

Flo asked me last night why I wanted to go to Dachau, and to a large extent I couldn't answer him. It was a mixture of reasons, but I think mainly because I'd learned so much about it in high school and Uni that I felt it was about time I actually saw it with my own eyes. I don't really know what I expected to see, and whether it would change my point of view, but I knew that I had to go there.

Nothing can prepare you for a visit to Dachau (or Auschwitz, or Bergen-Belsen or any of the other camps). It's just unimaginable that such a camp existed for so long. Dachau was in operation from 1933 to 1945 and in that time thousands of inmates were worked or starved to death. It was not a designated 'extermination camp' as Auschwitz was, namely because it was within Germany. All the extermination camps were in the East - even the Nazi party realised it would not be pleasant to live next to one.

Having said that however there are people today who live right next to Dachau CC. I mean RIGHT next to it, in 2-storey buildings overlooking the campsite. That's just disturbing.

But back to the camp. The most scary aspect of the entire visit was the Infirmary. Here they undertook 'experiments' on inmates. These ranged from tests to ascertain how long someone would survive if plunged into ice-cold water, to ones testing a German version of penicilian by injecting patients with various viruses and seeing if the drug had any effect. What scared me most about all of this was that the reasoning behind it was fairly sane, in that I could see the thought processes behind it. It wasn't straight-out sadism, it was planned and calculating. For example, the ice-cold water tests were undertaken to work out how long the air force should look for survivors from a plane crash.

BUT THESE WERE REAL, INNOCENT PEOPLE!

After Dachau we both felt a bit numb, and so drove back into München city centre and went shopping. As you do. Bought some awesome homemade chocolates though.

We had a fantastic Thai red curry, and I visited Bianca's University and the White Rose monument. The White Rose was a resistance movement that distributed anti-Nazi pamphlets within the University. They were captured almost immediately and executed by the SS.

Fell asleep during the film 'Ghost Dog' at 12:30am.

PS: This movie has to rate as one of the worst I've ever seen. It's supposedly about the samurai and the mafia in New York. Hah! It's like someone has sat down and gone, "Right I want to see the Mafia, something Japanese, an illicit love affair, and I know, PIGEONS (!)". Stupid stupid people. Z-Grade Nonsense!

PS: For photos of Dachau, click here.