During the Holocaust, Germans took the lives of During the Holocaust, Germans took the lives of six million Jews and, if Germany had been defeated, we would have millions more. The Holocaust was also the defining feature of German politics and political culture during the Nazi period, the most shocking event of the twentieth century, and the most difficult to understand in all of German history. The Germans’ persecution of the central feature of Germany during the Nazi period. This is because of what it meant to Germany at the time and why so many of them contributed to it.
Dachau is a name that will be forever associated with Nazi situations and crimes against humanity. Sense March 22, 1933 in a former World War 1 powder factory just outside the 1200-year-old Bavarian town of Dachau, the Dachau concentration camp was one of the first in the Third Reich’s network of concentration camps and forced throughout Germany and the Nazi occupied countries. Used primarily to destroy Communist, Social Democrats, trade Union leaders religious dissidents, common criminals, Gypsy men, homosexuals, asocial and others who were considered “enemies of the state,” Dachau was the place where many top level political rivals of the Nazi government were held, including the former Chancellor of Austria, Kurt von Schuschnigg, and the former Jewish premier of France Leon Blum.
The excuse for setting up the first concentration camp in Bavaria was the hysteria following the burning of the Reichstag, which was the Congressional building in Berlin, on the night of February 27, 1933 only four weeks after Adolf Hitler was taken in as Chancellor of Germany. The Nazis blamed the Communists of the arson fire, but the Communists claimed that the Nazis had set the fire themselves in order to begin a reign of terror. After President Paul von Hindeburg used his emergency powers under Article 48 of the German Constitution to hold off all evil rights, the leading Communists were imprisoned with no formal changes being brought against them. The first prisoners brought to the old gunpowder factory were 200 Communists, including some of the members of the Reichstag, who had been taken into “protective custody.” Heinrich Himmler, who had been nominated the Munich Chief of police, announced the opening of the camp in a news conference on March 20, 1933.
For the first five years that the concentration camps were in use, no Jews were brought to any of the camps just because they were Jewish. This changed after the Nazi program against the Jews on the nights of November 9^th and 10^th, 1938, known as Kristallnatcht. Approximately 30,000 Jews were arrested and taken in Germany, including 10,911 who were brought to Dachau and held as prisoners while they were pushed to sign their property and leave the country. The majority of them wound up in Shanghai, the only place that did not require visa, because other countries refused to take them.
After the overthrow of Poland in 1939, lots of Polish resistance fighters were brought to Dachau, including 1780 Polish Catholic priests with a total of 2720from 19 different nations. Also among the Dachau prisoners were 109 anti-Nazi Protestant clergyman, including the Reverend Martin Nemoller, one of the founders of the Protestant Confessional Church.
Following the invasion of the Soviet Union, there was a lot of Russian Prisoners of War at the Dachau camp. On Hitler’s orders, the Russian POW’s (prisoners of war) who were Communists Commissars were excited at the SS shooting range, located at Hebertshausen, north of the camp. Throughout its 12-year history, Dachau was generally a camp for non-Jewish adult males. Only at the very end were a few women survivors from other camps brought to Dachau. The only other women at Dachau were non-Jewish professional prostates who worked in the camp building for the inmates.
Approximately 150 Dachau inmates were forced to participate in medical experiments conducted by Dr. Sigmund Rascher for the German Air Force, and about half of them died as a result. Professor Dr. Klaus Schilling, a renowned expert on malaria, was persuaded to come out of retirement in order to conduct medical experiments on approximately 1,000 Dachau prisoners in an attempt to find a cure for malaria after German troops began fighting the Allies in North Africa. Hundreds died during the malaria experiment. The subjects for these experiments were mostly the Catholic priests in the camp because they were not required to work, and they would not be missed in the labor force if they died.
In February 1942, the Nazis began orderly gathering all the Jews in Germany and the Nazi occupied countries and transporting then to Poland and White Russia in a program of extermination, called the “Final Solution”, which was planned at the Wannsee conference on January 20, 1942. After the evacuation process began in February 1942, there was few Jews left in any camps in Germany, including Dachau. On April29, 1945 when Dachau was liberated, there were 2,539 Jews, including 225 women, in the camp according to the US Army census. Most of them had arrived only weeks or even days before, after they were evacuated from other camps.
In April 1942 a new brick building called Baracke X was planned for the Dachau camp. It was designed to house a homicidal gas chamber, disguised as a shower room, and four cremation ovens. Construction began in July 1942, using the labor of the only prisoners not forced to work in the factories at Dachau. The building was finished in 1943 but a sign in the gas chamber said today inexplicably informs tourists that this room was never used for gassing people. Instead, the Dachau museum says that 3,16 “terminally ill” prisoners were transported from Dachau all the way to Hartheim castle near Linz, Austria where they were murdered in a gas chamber there. A letter from Dr. Sigmund Rascher to Heinrich Himmler, head of the concentration camps, which makes a reference to a facility like one at Hartheim which the Nazis were planning to build at Dachau, is the best proof that the fake shower room in the crematory building was actually a gas chamber. The new Baracke X also contains four disinfections gas chambers designed to kill lice in clothing with the use of Zyklon B, the disinfections gas chambers designed to kill the Jews in the gas chambers at Majdanek and Auschwitz in Poland. The clothing was disinfected in all the camps in an attempt to prevent typhus, which is spread by lice.
When the death camps in Poland had to be abandoned, as the Russian troops advanced westward, the Jewish survivors were brought back to Germany and crowded into camps such as Bergen-Belsen and Dacha, which did not have enough room to hold them properly. Typhus, transmitted by body lice, which had been common in the ghettos and camps in Poland throughout the war now spread to the concentration cams in Germany. After January 1945, conditions in all of Germany and Austria, including the camps, became torn apart due to the chaos caused by the intensive Allied bombing of civilian areas in all the major cities.
Just west of the concentration camp, at Dachau, a large SS army garrison was also set up on the grounds of the former gunpowder factory. This place, which was three or four times the size of Dachau prison camp, included an officers’ training school where German SS soldiers were educated to be administrators. It was here that the Nazi mass murders learned their craft, including the notorious Adolf Eichmann, head of the Race and Resettlement office, and Rudolf Hoss, the infamous Commandant of Auschwitz.
Theodore Eicke, who became the second Commandant of Dachau in 1934, is considered the “father of the Nazi concentration camp system” because all camps were based on his Dachau camp. Beginning in 1936, all the old gun power factory buildings in the prison compound were torn down and the prisoners were forced to build a new camp with thirty-four darrack buildings, a gatehouse and a large service building. Two rows of popular trees were planted along a main camp road; the service building
and all barrack buildings had flowerbeds in front of them. The precise layout of the Dachau camp with its distinctive gatehouse became a model for Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen, two new camps that were built between 1936 and 1937. During its 12-year history, Dachau had 206,206 new arrivals and there were 31,951 certified deaths. Many of the Dachau prisoners, including a few Jews, were released after serving a sentence of not less than six months. The Jews were always kept isolated from the other prisoners and were treated far worse than the others. On April 26, 1945, three days before camp was liberated, there were 30,442 prisoners counted during roll call. There were an additional 37,223 prisoners counted in the branch camps near Dachau on April 26, 1945, the last roll call.
Due to horrific overcrowding and the spread of contagious diseases brought from Poland by the new arrivals, the number of recorded deaths at Dachau in the last four chaotic months of the war jumped to 13,158. After the US Seventh Army liberated the camp on April 29, 1945, an additional 2,226 prisoners died in the month of may and 196 more died in June. The total number of deaths in the first five months of 1945 was almost half the camp. The death rate in the other camps also rose dramatically in the last months of the war.
By October 1944, there was a shortage of coal in all Germany and the dead could no longer be cremated. A new cemetery was opened on a hill north of the camp, called Leitenburg, where the last Dachau victims were buried in unmarked mass graves. Ashes of earlier unknown victims are buried in the woods behind the new crematorium, where markers were placed on the sites of the mass graves between 1950 and 1964.
On April 29, 1945, Dachau became the second major Nazi concentration camp to be liberated by American troops, after General George S. Patton’s Third Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11, 1945. On April 28, 1945 Camp Commandant Martin Weiss left the Dachau camp, and 2^nd Lt. Wicker surrendered the camp to the American Seventh Army, which was on its way to take the city of Munich, 18 kilometers south of the camp. A Red Cross representative accompanied by, Wicker surrendered the Dachau concentration camp to Brigadier General Henning Linden of the 42^nd Rainbow Division under a white flag of truce. The 45^th Thunderbird Infantry Division also participated in the liberation of Dachau, arriving at the southeast entrance into the nearby SS main entrance where Wicker was waiting to surrender.
Before reaching the concentration camp, the 45^th Thunderbird Division had discovered an abandoned train, which no engine, on a branch railroad line, which at the time ran from Dachau station along Freisinger street in the direction of the camp. Inside the 39 train cars were the corpses of 2,310 prisoners who had been evacuated from Buchenwald on April 7, 1945 and, because of heavy bombing and starfing by Allied planes in the last days before the American soldiers arrived. Most of the SS guards had left the camp the next day and there was no one left to remove the bodies and burn them. The train had started out with 4,500 to 5,000 prisoners on board about 1,300 made it to Dachau still alive. Some of the dead had been buried along the way, or left in rows alongside the tracks. The gruesome sight of the death train, with some of the corpses riddled by bullets, so affected the young soldiers of the 45^th Thunderbird Division that they lined up German Waffen-SS soldiers stationed at the garrison, who had just surrendered, and executed them with their hands on the air.
German SS soldiers in guard tower B on the west side of camp were ordered to come out and were then shot by the American liberators, even though the tower was the white flag of surrender. Prisoners in the camp were then given gums by some of the American soldiers and were allowed to shoot of beat to death some of the German guards while liberators looked on. The bodies of the dead German soldiers added to the pile of dead inmates in front of the new crematorium building, and were later burned in the crematory ovens.
Upon entering the camp after the surrender, the American liberators, and the news reporters with them, were horrified to discover over 900 sick and dying prisoners in the infirmary barracks. According to the court testimony of the camp doctor, as many as 400 prisoners were dying of disease each day in the final days before the liberation. Most of the regular guards had escaped leaving behind the unburied naked bodies of those who had died in the last days before the liberation. Accompanied by Communist political prisoners, who served as guards, the Americans toured the prison camp and were shown the building just outside the barbed wire enclosure, which the gas chamber disguised, as a shower room. The Americans heard eye-witness of prisoners who had been gassed to death in this chamber and stories of there prisoners being shoved into the crematory ovens while still alive. Bodies of fully clothed dead inmates were found piled inside the new crematorium building and many more naked corpses were piled up outside. Outside the disinfections chambers, there was a huge pile of clothing waiting to be fumigated with Zyklon B gas pellets.
“Dachau, 1933-1945, will stand for all times one of histories most gruesome symbols of inhumanity. There our troops found sights, sounds, and stenches horrible beyond belief, cruelties so enormous as to be in comprehensible to normal minds. Dachau and death were synonymous.” -Col. William W. Quinn, 7^th U.S. Army
“Until May 1, 1945, I had never heard of a place called Dachau. After that date more than a half-century ago, I’ve never been able to forget it…. Not that anyone should—ever.” -Don Rodda

Miranda Archer 7^th Social Studies Rossville Jr. High Holocaust Project Spring 2003

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