I usually avoid guided tours, but sometimes they are the best way to see and understand things. So I signed us up for an English language tour of Dachau. Our tour guide was a young American married to a German woman. He's a historian, so he was well prepared to be a guide.
We met at the Hauptbahnhof in Munich on Friday, September 11th. Remember, we were staying just a few blocks away and this is the main reason why. We took the train to the town of Dachau which is now a pleasant suburb of Munich. There we caught a bus to the memorial site.
One of the things our guide commented on along the way is this square and street named after President Kennedy. For many of you, this president is as distant as President Lincoln, but Europeans still love and revere him. Needless to say, there will be no George Bush tributes. In general Europeans despise him. One of our taxi drivers even called him a killer. And in general they seem to like and respect President Obama. We even saw some Obama signs still in people's windows.
We arrived at the site and started walking toward the entrance. This map shows a picture of the entire area from 1945.
I tried to take a few pictures of descriptive signs, but if you want to know more, go the the link or Wikipedia.
This is part of the original train platform where prisoners disembarked.
This is the infamous entrance. As we were walking to it, nothing looked very familiar to me. That was because the last time I was there, about 25 years ago, there were no trees planted. It was just open gravel and fences.
This is the gate you have probably seen many times before. Translated it means that work will make you free. But of course, we know it didn't.
These are placques honoring the American liberators of this camp.
The museum is in some surviving Nazi headquarters buildings. This sculpture reflects the torment of those who were here and in other camps throughout Europe.
And this tells us to remember those who died here because they resisted the Nazis.
These housing units are reconstructions, but they show what it was like for prisoners here.
This is a long, wide walkway between dozens of barracks foundations, all of which were full. In a later picture you can see the same trees but of much smaller size.
At first things didn't seem so bad. There were places to wash and toilets to use.
But conditions got harsher as the crowding got worse. At first there were lockers, benches to sit on and tables to sit at.
The beds were attached to each other, but each person had their own bedspace.
Then more beds were added and the tables and benches disappeared as did the boards dividing the beds.
And at the end, people were just crammed onto long platforms with no separation at all.As the crowding got worse so did the disease and pestilence.
So multiply those rooms by dozens more buildings just like that. The infirmary was continually expanded but the lack of medicines and medical equipment made it practically useless for caring for the sick. In the picture on the left you can see the small trees mentioned earlier.
These are the foundations of the barracks buildings you see in the picture above.
This is the Jewish memorial at the site. That's our tour guide leading us in.
It's a rather small space inside, with a blinding light from the top, even on the dreary day we were there.
Then you see that the light comes from a hole in the ceiling with a Menorah at the top of the shaft of light colored stone. If you look back at the first picture, you can see the Menorah at the top of the building.
This is the gate from the inside.
We went to the crematorium next. This was not the site of mass extermination like the other Nazi death camps. It was the place where they perfected the art of extermination, however.
This is a memorial to those who died.
The first time I came here, I swear I could hardly bear the smell. I thought to myself, it still smells the same. On later trips, I didn't experience that, but this time I did.
This is the outside of the "shower" where the Nazis dropped in the pellets. They went in through those holes in the wall.
This is the area where people's clothes were decontaminated. They were primarily killing lice on the clothes so that they could be used again.
This is the entrance to the showers. People were killed here, but primarily as experiments to figure out the most efficient way to do it.
You can see how low the ceilings are in this picture.
And this is one of the openings to the outside through which the pellets were dropped.
After people were killed in whatever way, they were usually taken to be cremeted since that was more efficient than trying to bury them. But the liberators found bodies piled everywhere. The Nazis had run out of fuel to burn them.
This plaque was a bit of suprise for me.
This is an example of what the wired fence around the camp was like.
We didn't have a lot of time in the museum and I didn't take many pictures. This map shows the countries of origin of Dachau's prisoners. I didn't realize that more came from Poland than Germany. 
I've never visited any of the real death camps. I don't think I could. As you might imagine, we were both pretty quiet on the way home. Still, if you are ever in the Munich area, you should go. None of us should ever forget what a lust for power, the hatred that comes from blaming others for your own shortcomings and a mob mentality can create.
