Dachau and Warrant Officer Ball

On Saturday, March 13, David and I headed to Dachau.  We decided that since we didn't have the children with us, we wanted to take the opportunity to go and visit a concentration camp.   I wasn't ready to have the kids see and learn in depth about concentration camps.  They have started to learn about WWII with all of the other historical places and maybe later when they are a little older.

It was a beautiful day, the sun was shining so David and I had a great relaxing drive there!!!  The scenery was almost worth it just to drive.  Sometimes I can't get over the beauty of the Alps!!!!

When we got there we signed up for the 11 am tour and had about 30 minutes before the tour began so we decided to take a walk down the memorial path.  This is the exact path that the prisoners had to take from the train station into the camp.  It was about a 30 minute walk.  Just imagine you have been in a cattle car for hours, maybe days without food or water and then forced to walk to your prison.  Then what comes next is even worse.

 

But first a little history about Dachau.  It was the first concentration camp and the only one that was open for the entire 13 years of the Reich.  Everything started from here.  It was more a training and labor camp then a prisoner camp.  The Nazis had a huge training area here for the SS.  Many of the cruelest leaders came from here and were then sent to other concentration camps, they were promoted based on their level of cruelty and ability to break down prisoners.  You might ask why Dachau.  During WWI, Dachau was a munition factory.  After the war, everything closed down.  There were huge, empty buildings and the unemployment was high here and plenty of train stations.  They figured it was a perfect place to start a camp based on location and facilities available, especially as they were trying to re-arm Germany. 

  

 Prisoners that were brought here were for slave labor, this wasn't a death camp like Auschwitz.  This also started as a place for political prisoners and was an all male concentration camp.  Most of the people that were brought here had never had a run in with the police before, they just opposed the Nazi government and were arrested.  Only about 25% of the prisoners in Dachau were Jews.  In the picture above it shows one of the factories at the camp.  Three buildings were erected during WWI.  During the years of the Nazi rule, scores of prisoner details were forced to work here in a variety of business enterprises, for example; saddlers, a shoe making workshop, a tailoring workshop for uniforms, or building SS facilities and army barracks, as a butcher's shop and a metalworking shop.  These prisoners were living off of an extremely small diet and expected to work 10-12 hour days with only one break for "lunch."  The death rate at Dachau was 25% and that was only because of starvation and accidents, not many were killed just to be killed at this camp.  In the beginning they lived on a diet of 1000 calories a day and towards the end only 400-500 calories a day.  What was also interesting is that they made this camp into a small city and built their own city hall so they wouldn't have to report all the deaths in camp to the other city hall.

These were some of the barracks that the Nazi's lived in and have now been taken over by the Bavarian Riot Police.  In 1980 two larger factory buildings were demolished and the debris was heaped into a wall to shield the police on the former SS grounds from the gaze of visitors to the Memorial Site. 

Once they marched  all the way here, they were met by the commander.  He basically told them they were nothing and weren't people anymore and would be treated as such.  Then they were marched through this door, the main guardhouse.  There were two lines of guards that the prisoners had to walk through.  As they were walking they were beaten at every step.  Most of the time the prisoners would try to run to the door but often someone would trip and fall or they would bottle neck at the door (the door has recently been stolen and they put this gate up until the original can be found, it was originally a huge wooden door with a small opening like the one here).  When this happened the beatings would continue until everyone made it through.  This was the initial step in breaking the prisoners. 

After they were brought in, they were taken through the administration building.  This is some of the original writing left in the building (this one means no smoking).

Here they were put into the card catalog.  They were cataloged by age, profession, etc so the Nazis could find who they needed fast.  Interesting fact, the German company--IBM, is the one that invented the program to catalog all these cards.  Then they were marched into another room, forced to give up their small bag of belongings.  Then they were stripped down.

In the next room they were shaved of all hair from their whole body.  They did this in three minutes with these tools.  At one concentration camp they had it down to 90 seconds per prisoner.

Once they were shaved they headed to the showers.  Now remember most have never had a run in with the police before, they have had everything taken from them including their clothes, shaved completely and now they were waiting for their shower.  As a part of breaking the prisoners the guards liked to mess with the prisoners and would have ice cold showers to start and then turn it to boiling.  Some prisoners would collapse because of all the adrenaline running through their systems and their bodies couldn't handle it.  Then they were given uniforms and numbers.  From then on they were only numbers, they no longer had first or last names.  If they were caught using names with each other they were tortured.  On the arches you can see rectangles, there used to be a strong beam all across this shower room.  The soldiers would tie the prisoner's arms behind their backs and hang them up there for an hour or so.  If the prisoners weren't in enough pain, they would then start them swinging back and forth.  Then if it still wasn't enough pain, they would sick their dogs on them and the dogs would bite them and pull at them.

Then if that wasn't enough, they were taken outside and put on this rack and were given 25 lashes.  They had to count the lashes and if they lost count they had to start over at zero.  If they couldn't speak German, they had to hope the guards would be able to see their fingers counting.

This is where they did roll call.  They had to do it twice a day.  There was no set time limit on how long the prisoners had to stand there.  When we were there, there was a cold wind blowing and even in March I was cold with a jacket and proper clothing, I can't imagine what they went through standing there in their thin clothes in the middle of winter for sometimes hours on end as it did not end until everyone was accounted for.  Roll call was usually called between 5-6 am.  They worked 6-12, 12-1 gruel for lunch, 1-8 back to work and then evening roll call.   The longest roll call in history was 12 hours in the middle of January.

The Nazis were great marketers, here they waited 2 hours to take this shot on roll call because they were waiting for the shadows.  The shadows take away their faces, which takes away their humanity.  They are all bald, in uniform and they aren't emaciated.  They told the German people they were taking people who were trying to hurt Germans.  During roll call they had to account for everybody, so when people died they had to bring the bodies to roll call to be counted.  One thing the Germans did was put pockets in their pants as a way to further break them among other ways.  There was no reason for them to have pockets because they had no possessions but if they put their hands in their pockets they would be put in a box where they couldn't sit, with a light flicking on and off every couple of minutes so they would have to stay awake for a full 24 hours.  If they made direct eye contact they would be put in the box or worse.  Hitler liked to give the prisoners hope so on his birthday and Christmas he would let 1000-2000 prisoners go a year, this was to reinforce the propaganda that hard work would set you free.  They had to swear allegiance to the Nazi party as well a secrecy for what went on in the camp when they left.  Normally they would leave and go right back to fighting against the Nazi party.  Many times the same prisoner would be arrested after being released.

I know you can't read this very well but it says; May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1932-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men.

This was our American guide and she was awesome.  The map behind her shows all of the concentration camps, death camps and subsidiaries.

There were over 1500 subsidiary camps, 21 concentration camps plus exterminations camps.  450,000 Jews were killed in 11 months in Belzec and 800,000-900,000 were killed in 14-15 months in Treblinka, which was more than Auschwitz.  All these camps were started from Dachau, it was the central camp.

What I found interesting was in Dachau how many prisoners came from all over Europe.  Some examples, from Germany there were 31,456, Poland 40,395, Russia 25,113 just to name a few.  Some of the prisoners were German Jews that fought in WWI for the Fatherland and thought they were safe, but they were still picked up and brought here.

This shows the number of prisoners that were there every year.  You can see that it started out small and grew, in 1944 you can see there were 78,635 prisoners.  This was because all the prisoners were being brought back here as they were losing on both fronts and camps were being liberated.  The Nazis moved the fitest prisoners (often in a sort of death march) to other camps further behind their lines in order to keep them working.  Part of how they financed the war was through the exploitation of these prisoners for work.  It became overcrowded and imagine doing roll call with that many prisoners.

This was a painting that one prisoner did of Dachau after the war was over.  There is the all seeing eye of God on top of it, but his eyes were closed so He didn't see what was happening in the camp.  You can see the dead bodies in front for roll call and all of them in uniform.

You can see this statue at the beginning or end of death march of the concentration camp prisoners.  This shows the beginning of the one in Dachau when it was going to fall and the Germans took all the healthy prisoners out and  tried to move them to a different camp.

Dachau had one of the nicer barracks of the concentration camps.  At the beginning of the war they had these nice three tier bunks with ladders going up them.  They were made to keep about 50 prisoners.

As the war went on they went to three tier beds, no ladders but still fairly nice.

They each had lockers to put their coat in and their utensils and bowls.  If they lost them or they were stolen they would not get another set and wouldn't be able to eat.  As the crowding was getting worse towards the end of the war, they could be up to 5 or 6 prisoners sharing one set of utensils.  If you were the last one to get a turn you might not have anything left to eat and by that time they were only getting 400-600 calories a day so they had to be careful about who they chose to share these precious few items with.

A lot of prisoners from other concentration camps said when they came after the war and saw they had toilets and sinks, they were amazed at how nice they are here.  Some of the concentration camps just dug out the barracks so the prisoners, during the rainy season, actually slept in freezing cold water.

Toward the end, when all the people were coming back from the other camps, the rooms that were meant for 50 now held 450-500 prisoners.  As you can see, there were just slats and no ladders on the bed.  There were many advantages of the top bunk if they could actually physically get up there.  One was that heat rises, so you were a little warmer.  Also because of sickness, when people couldn't get up in the middle of the night the people on the bottom bunk got the worst of it.

All the barracks on the left were even numbers and on the right were odd numbers so all of those outlined areas are where barracks used to be.  The Germans would intentionally put culturally opposed people together just so they would fight each other and kill each other rather than having to do it themselves.  They also had a state of the art dental clinic here. They would use it to show higher ups and the media how nice they were treating the prisoners, etc.  The only time it was used though was to take out the gold fillings of the prisoners.  The last three barracks on the left were filled with clergy men.  The Pope knew they were there and made demands so that they would get extra food, 1/8 Liter of beer everyday, and the lightest work at the camp.  Of course the Germans did the opposite.  They gave the priests the most strenuous labor of brick laying for the crematoriums.  Imagine the mind games of being a man of God and having to build the crematorium and/or gas chamber.

This was the ditch that ran along all the walls of the concentration camp, there was also barbed wire on the loose ground and the fence.  It made for an impressive barrier to the prisoners.  In some places they also had electrified fences that a few prisoners used to committ suicide to escape the torture.

This is a view from inside the camp, you can see the stack to the crematorium from the camp.  The prisoners could see and smell the bodies burning.  Later the prisoners and people that lived in the town said that they could still smell it for years after as the smell was stuck in their nostrils. 

The first crematorium they built, they burned 1100 bodies.  They could do two at a time because they were so emaciated.  This became too small so they had to build a new one.

This was the second larger crematorium.

These were the shoots that they would put the gas into for the gas chamber.  It wasn't used as much or almost not at all here.  The tour guide says these are much smaller than the ones at Auschwitz, etc.

This was the actual gas chamber, again the guide said it was extremely small and thought not to be used much, possibly only for training.  Remember at this camp they were used for slave labor more than just attempted genocide.

They had four furnaces in this crematorium.  They would sometimes hang the prisoners right in front of the crematoriums, then put them into the furnaces.

Again with these, they could fit up to two bodies at a time and it took them between 10-15 minutes per body to cremate.  Towards the end they ran out of coal so they had to put them into mass graves instead of burning the bodies.

This statue was right out in front of the crematoriums.  There is a lot going on in this statue.  It is a statue for the unknown prisoner.  He has a shaved head, sunken cheekbones and eye sockets and his hands are in his pockets, which if you remember they got in big trouble over, standing defiantly with his back to the camp.  You also see the oversize shoes and coat because they didn't care what size you were, they just gave you things.  Underneath it says: to honor the dead, to remind or warn the living.

They had some mass graves around the crematorium.  This was the first one for the Jews.

This was the pistol range for the Nazis.  They used it as target practice on real people, mostly POWS and mostly Russians.

They called it Blood Ditch because so many POWs were killed that blood was literally flowing in the ditch.

Each different religion built a memorial to those that had fallen here.  The Russian Orthodox Church was the last one built even though they had the third largest population there.  It was built in 1994 in Moscow and was transported here by the Russian military.  It is elevated because the earth underneath is from all the former republics.

I thought this one looked very nice, it is the Catholic one.

This is the built to represent the bodies of the prisoners being the barbed wire fences, their fingers and toes are extended to make the fence.

This shows all the different colors that were put on their uniforms to tell the guards who they were, even where there was a hierarchy of who they were and that was part of what dictated how they were treated.  It also had a correlation with prisoners that became prison guards.  For instance a Jew that became a prison guard could not inflict punishment on a German non-Jew that was in the prison because they were higher up on the hierarchy.  Dachau was the second to last camp to be liberated.  On April 29, 1945 the Americans came and liberated the camp and took it over.  When they arrived there were 31,000 starving, emaciated people there.  The soldiers gave them powdered milk and oatmeal, but even that was too much for their starved bodies.  After the liberation over 1,200 prisoners died from the result of disease and exhaustion.  It was then used for war trials, POWs, and  a refugee camp until the mid 50s.  In 1955 the Bavarian government wanted to bulldoze it down but the town stood up and said no so they could remember.  The Americans didn't leave until 1972 when the Olympics came to Germany and they needed the buildings.  It was a very humbling experience and one that I am glad we went to see.  After that we headed back to Garmisch for the big ball.

David and I all ready for the ball.  It was a quick change because we got back a little later than we thought.  The tour went longer at Dachau then we were told.

They did such a wonderful job with the decorations at the ball.  It was casino royale theme.

Having a great time at the ball!!!

 Usually when you go to a ball you get some sort of gift, usually a glass or something.  Here they gave us Italian Carnivale masks!!  I have to say this was one of the best balls I think I have been to.  It was so well done, the food was great and the entertainment was awesome!  They brought in the Coast Guard Academy choir, that was awesome!  The other thing I thought was cool at the end of the night when the dancing started, they welcomed the kids to come and have fun!!  I really liked that about it as well.

The next day, sadly, we had to go home.  But we left to the sun rising over the Alps.  It really showed God's glory in the early morning light.  It was a great weekend and we were very lucky that our friends kept our children so we could have that time just the two of us.