More than 28, people died at Dachau between and , but the total number of deaths at the camp is not known. By April the water, sewage, and electrical systems had all failed; 32, sick and starving prisoners had been jammed into a space intended for one-third that number; and more than 39 railroad boxcars filled with dead people had been transported there for disposal.
The U. As the th labored to restore civility and order to a world that had descended into barbarism and chaos, a young American medic, writing home to Michigan, struggled to describe a scene that lay beyond his worst imaginings. Using stationery found in the abandoned office of the camp commandant, Porter found himself at a loss to convey the horrors he encountered at the Dachau concentration camp: boxcars filled with thousands of decomposing bodies, the crematorium surrounded by stacks of nude corpses, and the stacks of carefully sorted clothing belonging to the victims.
His account is unsparing and graphic, with descriptions of what the bodies looked like, the sounds they made as they were being moved, and their odor. Days after entering the camp, he was still trying to grasp the reality of what he saw. The SS administrators who operated the camp claimed that Nefzger had committed suicide, but an autopsy disclosed that he likely lost his life due to asphyxiation or strangulation. The prosecutor was immediately overruled by Hitler, who issued an edict stating that Dachau and all other concentration camps were not subject to German law as it applied to German citizens.
SS administrators alone would run the camps and hand out punishment as they saw fit. Prisoners deemed guilty of rule breaking were to be brutally beaten. Those who plotted to escape or espoused political views were to be executed on the spot.
Prisoners would not be allowed to defend themselves or protest this treatment. On the evening of November 9, synagogues in Germany and Austria were burned and Jewish homes, schools and businesses were vandalized. Over 30, Jews were arrested and dispatched to Dachau and the Buchenwald and Sachsenhausen concentration camps. Nearly 11, Jews ended up in Dachau. By early , Dachau had been reconverted into a concentration camp. Conditions at the camp were brutal and overcrowded. The facility had been designed to house some 6, detainees, but the population continued to rise and by approximately 30, prisoners were packed into the camp.
Instead, the chancellor determined that the sole solution would be the elimination of every European Jew. Also set for extermination were members of any group considered by Hitler to be ill-equipped to reside in the new Germany.
Several thousand Catholic clergy members were also incarcerated at Dachau. One was Titus Brandsma , a Carmelite cleric, philosopher, writer, teacher and historian as well as an avowed anti-Nazi. Brandsma arrived at Dachau in June , and died the following month after being given a lethal injection.
In January , Kozal perished from a lethal injection. Pope John Paul II beatified him in Over the years of its operation, from to , thousands of Dachau prisoners died of disease, malnutrition and overwork. Thousands more were executed for infractions of camp rules. Starting in , thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were sent to Dachau then shot to death at a nearby rifle range. She also happened to be the wife of novelist Ernest Hemingway, whom she married in As an "embedded journalist" she accompanied the US army on the front lines.
The main gate of the former concentration camp, with the infamous Nazi slogan 'Arbeit macht frei' 'Work sets you free'.
Gellhorn gathered from the camp files that well over , prisoners were interned in Dachau concentration camp since its opening in Her numbers were later corrected to take into account even more deaths in various sub-camps as well as those resulting from other schemes of the SS. The facts and figures related to the death toll and human conditions inside Dachau shows that even the experienced war reporter was shaken.
Towards the end of her article, she can no longer suppress cynicism. Inhumane medical experiments were performed at the concentration camp; here a subject is immersed in a tank of ice water. Prisoners were killed in the gas chamber because, though they were too weak to work, they did not have the grace to die, so it was arranged for them.
Dachau was one of the first concentration camp that the Nazis built on German soil. By order of Nazi leader Heinrich Himmler , Chief of Police, an internment camp for 5, male prisoners was built in a disused ammunition factory near at the gates of the small Bavarian town of Dachau in spring From its construction to its administrative organization, Dachau became a model for the other concentration camps.
Opened March 22, on the initiative of Heinrich Himmler, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. The first prisoners in Dachau were political prisoners: opponents of the Nazi regime, trade unionists, social democrats, communists, homosexuals and in some cases, conservative politicians.
They were later followed by criminals, Jehovah's Witnesses, Sinti and Roma, politically committed Christians, and also Jews. Eicke also developed orders for the criminal treatment of the inmates. With military drills and merciless severity, he trained SS supervisors to get used to torture, brutal violence and being part of the killing machine.
As the prisoners dragged themselves from the barracks to the roll call square in the early morning of April 28, , they were amazed to see that the SS had raised a white flag on one of the watchtowers. Most of the SS men had long since fled. The remaining guards tried to keep the prisoners in check with machine guns. Rumors ran through the camp like wildfire.
It was the second to last of all concentration camps to be liberated by the allied troops. On April 30, , the Americans marched into Munich, where the Nazis had established the "capital of the movement," as it was called in Nazi jargon, which contained the party headquarters of the Nazi party.
On the same day, they learned that Hitler and his partner Eva Braun had committed suicide in their bunker in Berlin. The last transports of prisoners were liberated by US troops in early May. On May 8, the "unconditional surrender" came into effect, and the war was finally over. The Nazi past of relatives could and can be a taboo subject in some German families. But a number of descendants of Nazi criminals want to find out more in a quest to come to terms with themselves. After 14 years in office, the chancellor has visited Nazi Germany's most notorious concentration camp.
While there, she underscored her country's enduring responsibilities.
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