Today's topic is a mournful one. One that commands our attention. 

Dachau Concentration camp. 

Opened in 1933 by Heinrich Himmler, Dachau was the first concentration camp opened by the Nazi's and it's main purpose was to house political prisoners. Over the next twelve years of use, the Dachau administration recorded the intake of 206,206 prisoners. Many of whom died in the camp. 

Since Dachau was the first of the concentration camps, it was also used as a propaganda camp. The site was originally that of an abandoned munitions factory, but eventually by the sweat of prisoners, it was turned into a very aesthetically pleasing camp. It's hard to even put "aesthetically pleasing" in the same sentence as "concentration camp," but that is what it was. The Nazi's wanted to make sure that when they invited journalists to the camp to "show that they treated prisoners well" they were met with a beautiful site. The Nazi's would then keep all the prisoners inside the barracks and only bring out those who were the fittest so as not to show the reality. 

 The infamous, "Work makes you free."

 Memorial just inside the entrance gate. 

 The headquarters. This building also contains the kitchen, but is now used as a museum. 

 The roll call courtyard with watchtowers. 

 Another memorial to all the people who suffered and died here. 

 Inside the prison in which political prisoners were kept. 

 The foundations to the barracks that once stood here. 

 Only two reconstructed barracks remain. The rest are shown here by their gravel filled foundations. 

 Original fencing 

 Inside one of the reconstructed barracks. 

 The washroom

 Toilets 

 Beds

 Wooden lockers. 

 Barrack number 1

 A photo of the barracks during the war. The trees you see here lining the walkway are still here today. 

 The larger crematorium.  

The larger crematorium housed three ovens.   

 This was the gas chamber. Amazingly, it was never put to use.  The black marks on the ceiling are the fake shower heads. This gas chamber was different from others in that the gas wan't planned to come out of the shower heads but rather dropped in canisters through a box outside with a grate leading into the room. 

Like this.

 The entrance to the gas chamber. 

 Chambers where the deceased prisoners clothes would be sanitized. 

 The outside box where canisters of gas were planned to be dropped. 

 This was the original crematorium building that housed only one oven. Due to the amount of prisoner deaths, the larger crematorium had to be built.

 Outside the crematorium were plaques marking the mass graves. 

 This one marked where the pistol range was for execution. 

 Execution range with blood ditch. 

 Here in this picture the slab of concrete was the old platform for the trains that ran through here. Unlike other concentration camps that had prisoners delivered by train, Dachau didn't have a train station nearby the first couple of years and so the prisoners had to march through the town. These tracks were built later during the construction of new buildings in the camp for supplies. Eventually when the American troops arrived to liberate the camp, the train cars were full of thousands of dead bodies. This was the first thing they saw upon arrival. 

As a youth, I was horrified the first time a read about the holocaust. In the following years after writing countless papers on it for school and reading as many books as I could get my hands on, my eyes still fill with tears thinking of what happened here. How could a human being do this to another? 

It was a horrific, humbling, heart wrenching, amazing journey we took this day. I will never forget all those who died here.