21.3.1933 Completion of the Dachau concentration camp

It was a horrible sight, the barracks reeked of death and disease. This was the concentration camp at Dachau when it was liberated by the American army. The Germans built the death factory in just two months, completing it on March 21, 1933.

The Dachau concentration camp was built overlooking the medieval town of the same name, sixteen miles northwest of Munich. "Before it, there were camps at Oranienburg, Lugau and Plauen. However, these were makeshift disciplinary camps. The Dachau concentration camp had already been established with the intention of making it a permanent facility," writes Milan Hes in his book And to Open the Gates: Liberation 1945 - Dachau-Oswiecim-Teresien.

In the beginning, the camp was created in the premises of an abandoned gunpowder factory. Twenty flat, semi-dilapidated barracks, an administration building and hundreds of metres of barbed wire. "It had to be enough for now. The first prisoners slept on concrete floors and even thinning blankets did not protect them from the cold. They had to look around for some materials to make bunk beds before the guards could supervise them. The first concentration camp grew in a somewhat improvised way," Hes explains.

The first commander was Hilmar Wäckerle, who was constantly bossing his men around. Nel liked to talk to the prisoners and hand out cigarettes. "Comrades from the SS! You all know why the Führer called us here! We didn't come here to treat the swine inside humanely. We don't consider them human like us, but second-class people. For years they have been able to carry out their criminal activities. But now we are in power. If these swine had come to power, they would have cut off all our heads. That's why we won't know any mercy either. Those who can't see the blood of their friends don't belong to us and will leave. The more of these swine dogs we shoot, the less we have to feed them," Wäckerle scolded the guards.

The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the American army on 29 April 1945, and thirty thousand dead prisoners were found inside. It was a horrible sight, the barracks reeked of death and disease. In six barracks, starving and dying prisoners lay one on top of the other - 1,200 people in a space calculated for 200.

"The dead - 300 of the sick had died the day before - lay on the asphalted paths beside the barracks and others were being carried out. You could see the starvation on all of them. In the two rooms designated for torture, some 1,200 corpses lay side by side. In the crematorium there were hooks on which the SS men hung their victims when they wanted to beat or torture them in other ways. The fresco they painted on the wall was significant. It depicted a man without a head, in uniform and with SS insignia on his collar. The man sat straddling a hugely inflated pig, whose spurs he drove into his side," described war correspondent Marguerite Higgins, whose report from Dachau appeared in the New York Herald Tribune.

A total of 188,000 people were imprisoned at Dachau. A large number of the victims died in the last few months before liberation. Others died after liberation. "When the Americans came, they requisitioned pigs and other things in the area to feed us. But they gave us terribly fatty food and many people still died from it," said surviving prisoner Chanan Bachrin.

Source: Milan Hes: And to open the gates - Liberation 1945 - Dachau-Oswiecim-Teresien, Guido Knopp: Holocaust, www.bbc.com