Dachau Overview

The first thing prisoners saw as they entered Dachau was the inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (work will set you free) on the iron gate of the Jourhaus, the only entry to the camp. Dachau was the Third Reich’s first concentration camp, opened in 1933 to house political prisoners on the former grounds of a WWI munitions factory. After Hitler visited the camp in 1937, it became a model for the construction of the more than 30 other camps throughout Nazi-occupied Europe and a training ground for the SS officers who would work at them. Dachau was primarily a work camp, as opposed to extermination camps like Auschwitz; during the war, prisoners made armaments and were hired out to work sites in the area. Many prisoners were worked to death. Those who volunteered for medical experiments in hopes of release were frozen to death or infected with malaria in the name of science. The barracks, designed for 6000 prisoners, once held 30,000 men—two of the buildings have been reconstructed for purposes of remembrance, but the rest have been destroyed. Walls, gates, and the camp’s crematorium have also been restored in a chillingly sparse memorial to the camp’s victims. On the site of the memorial are Jewish, Catholic, Lutheran, and Russian Orthodox prayer spaces. The Museum at the Dachau Memorial Site, in the former administrative buildings, examines pre-1930s anti-Semitism, the rise of Nazism, the establishment of the concentration camp system, and the lives of prisoners through photographs, documents, videos, interactive exhibits and artifacts. Most exhibits have captions in English. A short, particularly graphic film (22min.) shows in English at ­11:30am, 2, and ­3:30pm. An additional display in the bunker chronicles the lives and experiences of the camp’s prominent prisoners, including Georg Elser, the SS officer who attempted to assassinate Hitler in 1939.