KZ Gedenkst dte Dachau

If you`re visiting Munich, you really should spend an afternoon getting your history lessons straight and visit this sad and emotionally disturbing place.
Dachau is considered the first consentration camp, and served as a model for all later consentration camps. It was built in 1933, to get rid of political opponents of Hitler, but all together more than 200 000 people were imprisoned here and more than 43 000 died (probably a LOT more, but papers and personal belongings were destroyed so many deaths cannot be proven).

We visited Dachau a beutiful, sunny day in May 2008. It might sound a bit strange, but I would recommend taking this trip in cloudy or rainy weather, or at least not in such a warm and sunny day. The nice weather actually made my experience less intense. It is hard enough to understand that such horrible things have ever happened, but the nice weather made it even harder to let it all sink in. It all just felt too unreal.
But I guess it might be unreal and hard to relate to even in bad weather. It`s just too much, you know.

By the entrance you can rent audio guides (kinda like a phone, that tells you stories from the different sites in the camp). They cost about 3 Euros. I highly recommend these audio guides, they`ll give you much better insight in the camp and it`s history than you`ll ever get just walking around without any guidance.
If you arrive in larger groups you can also have a guide (a person) to walk you around. (You probably have to order this in advance).

The Dachau Consentration Camp memorial site consists of a large outdoor area where the prisoners lived in baracks, a gass chamber and a crematorium where they were executed and burned, and the large main building where there were some prison cells and where the medical experiments were conducted. This building also holds a large, indoors exibition/museum where you can see photographs and video and read the background and history of the consentration camp.

There is also a small movie theatre that shows the terrible history of the camp. The movie is about 30 minutes long. Not suitable for children!

Even if this is a morbid and disturbing site, it carries very important history, and it is a good memorial site which pays respect to the thousands of victims which ended their lives there.

For more information, please visit http://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/index-e.html