"The President of the Munich police has informed the press that the first concentration camp holding 5,000 political prisoners is to be organised within the next few days near the town of Dachau in Bavaria." - The Guardian, Tuesday March 21, 1933

Within weeks after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor in 1933, Heinrich Himmler and the SS set up a concentration camp on the grounds of a defunct munitions plant in the village of Dachau, northwest of Munich. Konzentrationslager Dachau, or KZ Dachau, was the first concentration camp that the Nazis set up, and it was the prototype for those that would follow. The original camp was enlarged in 1937 to include several barracks for housing a couple thousand prisoners. However, the camp was soon grossly overcrowded. More than 200,000 people from numerous religious, ethnic and social groups were imprisoned at Dachau during the 12-year existence of the camp. German political prisoners, gypsies, Jews, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, communists, Christian clergy, Polish civilians, Soviet prisoners, and some members of the Bavarian royal family, people from approximately three dozen countries in all.

Although not set up as a mass-extermination camp like Auschwitz and others, there were more than 25,000 documented deaths and likely thousands of others at the camp. In addition to murder at the hands of the Nazis, prisoners died from medical experiments on humans, a typhus epidemic, atrocious living conditions, the lack of meaningful medical care, and a forced march evacuation near the end of the war.

The camp was surrendered to the American Army on April 29, 1945. American troops found 32,000 prisoners, an average of 1,600 crammed into each of its barracks. They found more than 40 railroad cars each containing the bodies of 100 or more prisoners. Other bodies were found around the camp. Half-charred bodies were found in the crematoriums. In response to the conditions that the Americans found inside the camp, nearly three dozen captured German guards were executed. Some reportedly were made available to the prisoners who exacted their own revenge. More than 500 guards were arrested or fled.

KZ Dachau was not the biggest camp. More people were killed at a number of the other camps. But KZ Dachau was one of the first concentration camps to be liberated by Allied forces, and one of the first whose stories and images were published world-wide.

Mark Wasson, http://www.markwasson.com > Trips has detailed summaries of my trips

http://www.markwasson.com/u2007g07agermany.htm