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.