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The crematorium at Dachau was first constructed in 1940, but a larger facility was built next door between 1942 and 1943 as the first building proved to be inadequate in size in just months. Before 1940, when prisoners died, the SS sent ashes to families, buried bodies near the camp or transported them to Munich’s Ostfriedhof for cremation. It would be wrong to suggest that there was respect for the living or the dead at Dachau, but there were greater efforts made during the early years of the camp’s operation.

A plan of the new crematorium.

This is the 1940 building, which isn’t included on the above plan of the site. It remained in use until 1943 and it’s thought that around 11,000 prisoners were cremated here.

The old gallows stand outside, these were placed here in 1942, but killings would have taken place in numerous areas around the camp. Often prisoners were hanged as a warning to others, so they would have taken place on the main parade ground of the camp.

The ovens in the new crematorium where the dead were cremated. There was no fuel in the last few months of the camp’s operation, so they had to use nearby burial facilities or rather more ad hoc solutions instead. The Americans kept this section of the site when they liberated the camp in 1945, ensuring that it was documented and left intact.

The shower room with fake shower heads. This is just a little confusing, the museum makes clear that there’s no evidence these were used for the mass killing in the way that took place at other concentration camps, so it’s a little unclear to me exactly what happened here. It is though probable that this room was genuinely used for the disinfecting of clothes rather than mass murder for which there’s no real evidence.

It’s hard to imagine the horrors of what happened here when walking through, with what were likely mostly prisoners being forced to cremate those who they might have known from the camp. Initially the site might have been manageable in terms of numbers, but as the deaths increased then it all became more challenging and industrial. There weren’t the mass killings here that took place at camps such as Auschwitz Birkenau, but still many died and the whole arrangement would have been hideous. The site is hidden away a little from the main camp, but everyone would have been aware of its presence. When the war concluded, the Americans forced local Germans to walk around the site and that included visiting this section.

This walk at Dachau might at first seem quite pleasant and peaceful. Formerly in a walled off part of the compound, this is now known as the ‘path of death’, it was laid out in the 1960s when the site was turned into a memorial and museum.

However, it isn’t, it’s located near the site’s crematorium and this is the former pistol range where inmates were executed. There were numerous places around the camp where people were executed and it’s not known how many prisoners died here.

The execution range with the blood ditch.

Where ashes were stored.

The little memorial garden where the ashes of thousands of people were placed.

The gatehouse at Dachau is the building which every prisoner had to pass through to enter the main compound of the concentration camp. The SS called it the ‘Jourhaus’, literally the guardhouse, and it sat on the boundary between the SS administration area and the camp proper. The current structure dates from 1936 when the site was rebuilt in stone and concrete using prisoner labour. That rebuild turned Dachau into the model for many later camps, and the Jourhaus became the set-piece entrance through which every new arrival marched onto the roll-call square.

Architecturally it’s a two-storey, hipped-roof block with a central vaulted passage for the gate and small rooms to either side that once housed guards and clerks. In front of it ran the camp ditch and a narrow bridge and beyond it the space opened immediately into the Appellplatz, the vast parade ground where prisoners were counted for hours in all weather. The gate grid itself carries the infamous and deceitful phrase “Arbeit macht frei” and was made in the 1930s by a prisoner under Nazi orders, although the original is now stored internally after someone pinched it.

This is the side of the building that the prisoners could have seen from their barracks and the gatehouse controlled every movement and because the Jourhaus stood exactly at the choke point between the SS zone and the prisoner compound, nothing and no one crossed without it being noticed. When the site became a museum in the 1960s, the Jourhaus remained the main entrance so that visitors would trace the same line of movement as prisoners once did.

A plan of the building.

This sculpture sits on the wall marked “1933–1945” in front of the former maintenance building, which now houses the main museum at Dachau. The monument was created by the Yugoslav sculptor Nandor Glid (1924-1997), a Jewish partisan whose father was murdered at Auschwitz, and it was chosen through an international competition organised by the committee of former Dachau prisoners. It was unveiled in September 1968 and from a distance the work reads like fencing, uprights and strands that echo the camp’s perimeter but it’s then evident that it resolves into emaciated human forms entangled in barbed wire. The design is to allow the visitor to see the fence as more than infrastructure and the bodies as more than symbols. It is deliberately spare, without heroics or narrative scenes, so the viewer is left with the simple geometry of a system and the people it consumed.

The main monument is large, roughly sixteen metres wide and over six metres high, and it anchors the roll-call square where prisoners once stood for hours in all weather. Nearby is this low relief showing interlinked prisoner triangles, the coloured badges used by the SS to classify inmates by category.

The whole arrangement is powerful, especially the way in which it faces the parade ground where the ridiculous roll-calls would take place, designed to humiliate and exhaust the prisoners. I quite like these hefty sculptures, but there doesn’t seem much point trying for subtlety here when the focus needs to be on confronting what happened at Dachau.

This is one of the photos that Arland Musser took when the Americans liberated Dachau on 29 April 1945, showing prisoners beating an SS man who had disguised himself as a camp inmate. It must have been traumatic for the Americans to know quite what to do, their forces had been shocked at what they’d found and would normally want to protect everyone, but here they found a site where inmates wanted revenge for the horrors which they’d gone through. There was chaos as the American military lost control and started joining in on the attacks on the German guards, it took the strength of Felix L. Sparks, the American military leader, to regain control. He later wrote:

“As I watched about fifty German troops were brought in from various directions. A machine gun squad from company I was guarding the prisoners. After watching for a few minutes, I started for the confinement area. After I had walked away for a short distance, I hear the machine gun guarding the prisoners open fire. I immediately ran back to the gun and kicked the gunner off the gun with my boot.

I then grabbed him by the collar and said: “what the hell are you doing?” He was a young private about 19 years old and was crying hysterically. His reply to me was: “Colonel, they were trying to get away.”

I doubt that they were, but in any event he killed about twelve of the prisoners and wounded several more. I placed a non-com on the gun, and headed toward the confinement area.”

In 1936, the Nazis made camp prisoners forge the gate to the site which said “Arbeit Macht Frei” or ‘work makes free’. This signage was replicated at other Nazi controlled concentration camps, giving an impression that the sites were somehow educational and beneficial when the reverse was true. Unfortunately the original gate was stolen in November 2014, just a few years after the Auschwitz one was stolen. The one that is in place today is a replica made to replace the stolen one, a completely sub-optimal state of affairs and a sinister theft which was likely done to order.

Fortunately, in December 2016 the original gate was recovered under tarpaulin in Bergen, Norway after an anonymous tip-off. No arrests were made, but the museum was no doubt pleased and delighted to be able to have the original back. In the same way that the recovered Auschwitz sign was placed in a secure museum area after it was returned, the same was done at Dachau to prevent a recurrence of the incident. The museum carefully notes that the original lettering was removed by the Americans following the liberation of the camp, so this element dates from the 1970s.

I’ve been meaning to visit Dachau for some time to see the concentration camp, one of the earliest that opened during the Nazi regime and its purpose evolved over the years. This aerial photo was taken a few days before the Americans liberated it and it shows the scale of the site. The area marked in red is the section is the camp area that was used by the prisoners, which is also roughly the area of the site that remains open to visitors today. The former area used by the camp guards, the commandant and some of the workshop areas have since all been demolished.

A model of the site.

The site in 1944.

A US army map of the site from 1946.