Dachau Concentration Camp

In the early 1930s, the residents of the picturesque city of Dachau, Germany, were completely unaware of the horrific events about to unfold that would overshadow their city still today. The citizens of Dachau were oblivious that their city was going to become the origin of concentration camps and of the Holocaust, the mass murder committed by the Nazi s in World War II. Dachau Concentration Camp, which would soon be placed on the edge of their community, would serve as a model for all Nazi extermination camps. This perfect prototype of a Nazi killing machine has come to represent the start of the horror-filled Holocaust and the Nazi's determination to achieve a perfect society during World War II.

On March 21, 1933, only two months after Adolf Hitler was appointed Chancellor of Germany, Heinrich Himmler, the Commander of the Schutzstaffel (SS) Elite Police Force and one of the most powerful men in Nazi Germany, ordered that a camp for political opponents be built on the grounds of a deserted gunpowder factory on the edge of the small community of Dachau, near Munich. The Nazi-controlled newspaper, the VÐ"¶lkischer Beobachter (translated Racial Observer) proudly proclaimed that the first concentration camp, with a capacity of over 5000 prisoners, would be established near Dachau. The camp solved the problem of where to put "undesirables" who the Nazis needed to quiet. The existing jails were not spacious enough to hold all of the people standing between the Nazis and their goal to have a society ruled by the supreme Aryan race. When the plans for the camp were announced, many Germans protested the unlawful detention of political enemies but were quickly quieted when twenty prominent opponents of the camp were thrown into a prison camp themselves.

In June 1933, Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke to design the concentration camp and to become its first commandant. Eicke divided Dachau into two separate areas: the prisoner's camp and the command area. The original prisoner's camp included 18 barracks made to hold 280 people each, roll call area, disinfection barracks, and a camp detention area, also known as the bunker. The bunker acted as a prison within a prison and served several functions. It was the central site of cruelty; imprisonment in the bunker meant weeks without sufficient food and brutal beatings by the SS guards. Joseph Ulc, a Czech musician, was arrested in 1939 for being a political opponent to the Nazis and was sent to Dachau Concentration Camp. For allegedly planning to escape, he was severely beaten and forced to spend two weeks in the bunker. "It was horrible to be in complete darkness all alone. I starved for three days before on the fourth day I was given something to eat... I constantly spoke and counted my steps because sitting was not permitted. Often I shook my head in sheer disbelief," he said of his imprisonment in the bunker.

The SS guards also conducted interrogations in the underground rooms of the bunker. Often prisoners were tortured in order to extract a confession. Twelve standing cells were added to the bunker in 1944. With a surface area of only 490 square centimeters, prisoners in the cells could neither sit, lie down, or take in sufficient oxygen. Behind the bunker, prisoners were whipped and hung from poles.

The command area surrounded the prisoner camp. Nine guard towers, ditches, tall concrete walls, and electrified barbed wire encircled the whole camp. A maintenance building and living quarters for 200 SS trainees and 200 camp guards were positioned near to the camps only entrance and exit. Across the road from the camp was the crematorium.

Beginning in 1941, the concentration camp began to be used for extermination purposes in addition to detaining "undesirables". Due to the number of deaths, the crematorium had to be expanded because the existing one was unable to keep up with the number of bodies. The expansion made the crematorium the largest building in the complex. At the same time, eighteen more barracks and a gas chamber were added to the camp. However, the gas chamber was never used because the SS guards preferred to use the prisoners as targets during their training.

In addition to designing the camp buildings, Theodor Eicke, the commandant of Dachau, developed a system of rules and punishment within the camp that became the model for all other Nazi concentration camps. Eicke trained the camp guards to be completely obedient and increased punishment for disobedient prisoners; he also introduced the idea of force labor. Eicke's radical anti-semitism and successful controlling Dachau made an impression on Himmler and earned Eicke the position of "inspector of concentration camps" in July, 1934, through which he could spread his concentration camp style throughout Europe. Eicke also established an SS "murder school" in the complex in early 1940 so that the elite police officers could learn the successful imprisonment system at Dachau and apply it to other concentration camps.

The first prisoners at Dachau were political opponents of the Nazis. Communists, social democrats, gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, and Catholic priests were sent to the camp for imprisonment. It was not until Kristallnacht (The Night of Broken Glass) on November 9, 1939, that over ten thousand German and Austrian Jews were sent to Dachau. German prisoners eventually became a minority; the largest national group was Polish followed by prisoners from the Soviet Union. By the camp's liberation, over 200,000 prisoners from more than 30 countries had been imprisoned in Dachau Concentration Camp.

Before the war broke out across Europe, the prisoners in Dachau were forced to work for companies owned by the SS. Often they paved roads, worked in gravel pits, and cultivated farm land. In 1941 because of increased Allied bombings,