Dachau Concentration Camp

Following the German takeover of Bavaria, the Dachau concentration camp was established on March 22, 1933, and served as the first and longest-running Nazi concentration camp. While initially built for political prisoners and people deemed undesirable, it soon housed people with disabilities, people who identified as LGBTQ, Roma, Eastern Europeans, Russians, clergy, and Jewish persons. People detained there were subjected to overcrowding, malnutrition, brutal treatment, medical experimentation, and forced labor. The facility incorporated barracks, gas chambers, and crematoriums, and its design and procedures led to Dachau becoming the model that other Nazi concentration camps emulated. It is estimated that approximately 200,000 people were imprisoned in Dachau, and that between 30,000 and 100,000 persons died or were executed there. In early 1945, approximately 7,000 Dachau prisoners were forced in a death march to Tegernsee, Germany. Dachau was liberated by the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the US Army on April 29th, 1945.

Overview

The Dachau concentration camp is located outside of the city of Dachau, which is set along the Amper River in Bavaria in southern Germany near Munich. Throughout most of its history, Dachau was a small market town noted for its landscapes, textiles, and paper production. During World War I (1914–18), Dachau was the site of a rail junction and munitions factory. Following the German takeover of Bavaria on March 9, 1933, the Dachau facility was established on March 22 and became the first and longest-running Nazi concentration camp, remaining in operation from 1933 until 1945.

The Dachau concentration camp was initially established to house political prisoners, including communists, socialists, and union leaders; however, by 1939 it was increasingly utilized for the imprisonment of prisoners of war, the socially undesirable, and, later, Jewish persons. Throughout its operation, it included German, Bavarian, Czech, Yugoslavian, Russian, French, Polish, Roma, and Jewish prisoners. It also held political dissidents, clergy, and those labelled as enemies of the state, a category that included people who had committed crimes, people who had mental and physical disabilities, people who identified as LGBTQ, and others charged with violating the Nuremberg Laws (1935).

While the camp did have both gas chambers and crematoriums, it was never a death camp on the scale of facilities such as Auschwitz. The Dachau camp system was, nonetheless, responsible for almost 100,000 deaths and the transportation of other supposed undesirables to extermination camps throughout German-controlled territories. Prisoners were subjected to overcrowding, malnutrition, brutal treatment, medical experimentation, and forced labor. Prisoners were used as workers to run and expand the facility, and to aid the Nazi war effort, forced to labor under the camp slogan Work Will Make You Free. Its design, organization, efficiency, and methodology soon made Dachau the model most other Nazi concentration camps emulated throughout World War II (1939–45).

On March 22, 1933, the Nazi Schutzstaffel (SS), by directive of Heinrich Himmler, opened the first concentration camp, Konzentrationslager, or KZ-Lager, just outside of Dachau in an old ammunition factory on approximately five acres of property. Initially established to hold political prisoners (who could be released upon rehabilitation) and prisoners of war, Dachau housed relatively few specifically Jewish persons. Dachau, like subsequent concentration camps, was under the direct control of the SS and was soon relieved of judicial oversight and considered exempt from German law. Under the command of Theodor Eicke, Dachau included more than one hundred satellite labor camps. Throughout the 1930s, as the Nazis expanded their control over occupied territories, the need for facilities to hold prisoners of war and those thought to be socially undesirable increased.

Following the passage of the Nuremberg Laws (1935), Dachau increasingly received both ethnically and religiously marginalized people. As a result, Dachau, a facility designed to hold between 5,000 and 6,000 persons, soon housed approximately 30,000 prisoners, necessitating its expansion in 1937–1938. After Kristallnacht, or the Night of Broken Glass, on November 9, 1938, in which Jewish businesses and homes were targeted and attacked, Dachau was one of several concentration facilities to receive those ethnic persons who were arrested and displaced. As a result, in excess of 10,000 Jewish people were interned at Dachau in 1938.

In 1939, Dachau was again enlarged and was transformed into a training center, SS Kaseme, for the Waffen-SS. During this period, Dachau's inmates were moved to concentration camps in Buchenwald, Mauthausen, and Flossenbuerg. However, by 1940 Dachau was transitioned back into a concentration camp. In the years that followed, Dachau prisoners, including thousands of Russians, were subjected to medical experiments and utilized to study the effects of hypothermia, extreme decompression, and the influence of varying diseases. In 1942 a gas chamber and Barrack X, including several crematorium ovens, were constructed at Dachau, though never put into use. Nevertheless, large-scale executions did take place, including the murder of thousands of Soviet prisoners, starting in November 1941 and lasting until 1943. In addition, starting in late 1942, Jewish prisoners were increasingly deported to Auschwitz to be executed. In 1944, a women's camp was opened in Dachau.

In the months prior to the liberation of KZ Dachau, conditions deteriorated owing to a decline in supplies, malnutrition, overcrowding, and poor sanitation. In response to the success of American and Russian troops, on April 14, 1945, Himmler ordered the extermination of all Dachau prisoners and the subsequent evacuation of the camp. Consequently, on April 26, 1945, the SS led approximately 7,000 Dachau prisoners on a forced death march to Tegernsee, a southern German town, to aid in the construction of defenses in the region. More than 1,000 died of exhaustion, exposure, malnutrition, and mistreatment.

SS Heinrich Wicker surrendered Dachau to the 42nd and 45th Infantry Divisions of the US Army on April 29, 1945. At the time of its liberation, American soldiers discovered some 30,000 malnourished and emaciated survivors at Dachau. In addition, Allied troops located a large number of trains, at the local rail junction, loaded with thousands of corpses. While recorded numbers vary, it is estimated that over 200,000 persons were imprisoned for political, religious, and racial reasons in the Dachau concentration system. Furthermore, it is believed that between 30,000 and 32,000 people died or were executed while interned at Dachau, with an additional 35,000–40,000 more prisoners estimated to have died in Dachau's sub-camps. These estimates exclude the additional thousands of persons, originally imprisoned at Dachau, who were later transported to other facilities for extermination. A number of SS guards and Waffen-SS soldiers who had run the camp were executed by US soldiers without authorization, resulting in an investigation into the actions of liberating units by the American armed forces.

Following the camp's liberation in 1945 until 1960, Dachau was alternately used as a US military base, a facility to incarcerate soldiers awaiting war crimes trials, and as housing for displaced Eastern Europeans prior to resettlement. In 1965 a museum and memorial site were established at Dachau concentration camp. Like Auschwitz, Dachau has become enshrined as an example of the atrocities of Nazi policy, in particular because of the precise documentation of the period, which was subsequently located.

Bibliography

Berben, P. Dachau. 1933–1945: The Official History. Norfolk, 1975.

Caplan, J., and N. Wachsmann, editors. Concentration Camps in Nazi Germany: The New Histories. Routledge, 2010.

"Dachau Concentration Camp 1933–1945." KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau, www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/en/historical-site/dachau-concentration-camp-1933-1945/. Accessed 2 Oct. 2024.

Dillon, C. Dachau and the SS: A Schooling in Violence. Oxford UP, 2015.

Hayes, P., editor. Lessons and Legacies Volume III: Memory, Memorialization, and Denial. Northwestern UP, 1999.

Marcuse, H. Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001. Cambridge UP, 2001.

Neuhäusler, J. What Was It Like in the Concentration Camp at Dachau?: An Attempt to Come Closer to the Truth. Manz, 1993.

Neurath, P. The Society of Terror: Inside the Dachau and Buchenwald Concentration Camps. Paradigm, 2005.

Smith, M. The Harrowing of Hell: Dachau. Albuquerque: U of New Mexico P, 1972.

Wachsmann, Nikolaus. KL: A History of the Nazi Concentration Camps. Farrar, 2015.