Dachau
Overview
The name of Dachau has become inseparable from the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime. Yet the town itself — which you do not see during a memorial visit — has a long history dating back to Celtic settlement. In the 1500s the Wittelsbachs replaced the old Gothic fortress with a Renaissance palace used as a summer residence. In the 1870s Dachau became home to Germany’s most important artists’ colony, attracting painters who left Munich to paint landscapes directly from nature. Later in the 19th century, industry arrived with the construction of a paper factory, still the district’s largest employer. During the First World War thousands worked in a vast powder factory built to supply munitions. After the Treaty of Versailles forbade Germany from producing armaments, the factory stood empty until the 1930s.
After Hitler seized power on 30 January 1933, persecution and imprisonment of political opponents began immediately. Dachau concentration camp was created in March on the site of the abandoned powder factory. Initially holding political prisoners, it soon held Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, clergy, homosexuals and many denounced for criticizing the regime. After Kristallnacht in November 1938, more than 10,000 Jews from across Bavaria were transported to Dachau.
The first camp commandant, Theodor Eicke, created a system of organisation and regulations that became the model for all concentration camps. Prisoner barracks were surrounded by electrified fencing and guard towers, while administrative and SS areas stood apart. As the first concentration camp, Dachau became a training ground for the SS — a place where guards learned to view prisoners as subhuman and to brutalize and murder without hesitation. This dehumanization later underpinned mass extermination in camps built in occupied Eastern Europe.
Conditions and Expansion
The outbreak of war in 1939 marked a new phase. Prisoners began to arrive from occupied countries; by liberation Dachau held inmates from more than thirty nations, with only a small minority of German origin. Early in the camp’s history, prisoners were forced to build a larger camp when the original proved inadequate. By war’s end, overcrowding was catastrophic: barracks designed for 208 men held up to 1,600.
Official records list 206,000 registered prisoners between 1933 and 1945. Recorded deaths number 31,951, though the real total is unknown because victims of mass shootings and evacuation transports were not counted.
Dachau was not an extermination camp. Prisoners were exploited mainly for armaments production. As the war progressed, forced labor from concentration camp inmates became essential to Germany’s war industry, even as extermination policies targeted “undesirable” groups. This created a contradiction between the need for labor and the desire to annihilate entire populations.
Mortality was extreme. Starvation, disease, typhus epidemics, overcrowding and lack of sanitation were constant. Prisoners too weak to work were isolated in hospital barracks where most died without treatment, or they were transported to extermination camps. A gas chamber was constructed at Dachau but never used. Medical experiments conducted by SS doctors — on malaria, hypothermia, decompression and other conditions — killed many victims. Torture, beatings, executions and arbitrary punishments contributed further to the death toll.
After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, thousands of Soviet POWs were brought to Dachau; at least 6,000 were executed.
Evacuation, Liberation and Aftermath
As the Red Army advanced, the SS evacuated eastern death camps and sent thousands of dying prisoners to Dachau, worsening already horrific conditions. On 29 April 1945, U.S. forces liberated the camp — but not before 7,000 prisoners had been forced onto a death march southward.
After the war, Dachau served as a refugee camp for a decade. In 1965, with support from the Bavarian government, the memorial site was dedicated. The museum occupies the former administration building, and the International Monument stands in the former roll-call square. Two reconstructed barracks illustrate prisoner living conditions, while at the far end of the site, Catholic, Protestant and Jewish chapels commemorate victims.
Buchenwald
Overview
Buchenwald’s name derives from the beech woods of the Ettersberg near Weimar, which concealed one of the largest concentration camps in Hitler’s Germany. Built in 1937 for German political prisoners, it soon held Jews, Roma and Sinti, and other groups persecuted by the regime. Victims from occupied countries — including many children — arrived as the war expanded. Over the camp gate stood the chilling inscription “Jedem das Seine” (“To each his due”). When the camp was liberated, only about 5% of inmates were German.
Buchenwald was not an extermination camp. Prisoners were forced to work producing armaments, both within the camp and at nearby factories. Conditions were brutally harsh: exhaustion, starvation, disease and lack of sanitation caused thousands of deaths. SS doctors conducted lethal medical experiments, and summary executions were frequent. Prisoners no longer able to work were deported to extermination camps.
Evacuations and Liberation
As the Red Army advanced, the Nazis evacuated Auschwitz, Gross-Rosen and other camps, sending thousands of prisoners to Buchenwald. With the U.S. Army approaching from the west, the SS attempted one final evacuation: 28,000 prisoners were forced on a death march, leaving 21,000 behind, including 900 children. U.S. forces reached the camp on 11 April 1945, by which time the SS guards had fled and the camp was effectively liberated by its own inmates.
Postwar Use
After July 1945 the Americans withdrew, and the Soviet occupation authorities took over the camp, using it as an internment center until 1950. Of 28,000 detainees — many former Nazis, but also many arbitrarily arrested — approximately 7,000 died. The East German regime did not officially acknowledge this chapter of the site’s history until after 1989.
The Memorial Area
The memorial occupies the site of the earlier Bismarck Tower monument, once a patriotic gathering place. During the war the SS used its vaults to store urns containing ashes from the camp crematorium. When fuel shortages halted cremations in March 1945, bodies were buried in mass graves on the hill behind the tower.
After liberation, many prisoners continued to die from exhaustion and disease. With no time to build a cemetery, Americans buried the dead in long, linear mass graves behind the tower. As fatalities decreased, individual graves were added and a section of the Weimar cemetery was set aside for former inmates. In June 1945, 1,286 urns were moved from the tower and interred under a slab at the cemetery.
Once under Red Army control, the camp and cemetery were neglected. Records of burials were lost, and the tower — structurally unsound — was demolished in 1949. By 1951, plans were approved to demolish most surviving camp structures and create a memorial to the “victims of fascism” on the site of the Bismarck Tower. The landscape was reshaped around three natural depressions used as mass graves. At the center stands a bell tower and a sculptural group by Fritz Cremer honoring the camp’s resistance movement.
Under the GDR, the memorial became a national symbol, used in mass ceremonies to promote state ideology. Only after reunification did researchers uncover more precise burial information. In the 1990s, a handwritten list — created by a Polish inmate in 1945 — was rediscovered in Warsaw, identifying the individuals buried in the linear mass graves. Their names now appear on plaques. Additional human remains uncovered during 1997 restoration work have also been documented.