The Dreaded Story of Dachau

A concentration camp refers to a camp or closed area where people are detained under brutal conditions usually having no access to legal rights of arrest and imprisonment that would normally be accepted in a democracy. Concentration camps played a large part in the mass killing of Jews in Europe lead by Adolf Hitler. An example of a concentration camp is Dachau.

During the World War II, Jews were separated into two groups the healthy and the unhealthy. The unhealthy were immediately sent to an extermination camp where they were killed in gas chambers and had harsh experiments performed on them.The healthy were sent to concentration camps, where they would work until they died of starvation, or they earned their freedom, which did not happen often. On Wednesday, March 21, 1933 an article in Munchner Neuesten Nachrichten, a German newspaper, stated that “the first concentration camp would be open in the vicinity of Dachau…and it can accommodate up to 5,000 people. ” Initially, Dachau was seen as a good thing, it was looked at as in the best interest for the German people to contain the Jewish people in an area that they could not escape.

The Germans claimed the Jewish people were to blame for everything wrong occurring in Germany.Dachau was rectangular shaped, 990 ft. wide by 1980 ft. long. It had a moist, foggy, climate. On the prison camp there were 34 over crowded barracks.

Each barracks was thirty feet long by thirty three feet wide. The barracks were separated into two parts; each part had two dormitories, two living rooms, and one wash room. Each barracks was supposed to hold ninety people, and divided equally between the dormitories. The living room in the apartment had forty five closets to hold what little possessions the prisoners had, and each dormitory had forty five beds stacked above each other.

The camp was originally designed to hold 5,000 people but after 1942, there were never less than 12,000. Due to the rapid growth in the prison population, the dormitories were even more cramped and, at times held up to two hundred per dorm. There were many other buildings on the concentration camp. There was a disinfection hut, which cleaned people before they were released into the camp.

The disinfection hut helped eliminate lice and found defects on people that were missed in the original inspection. There were also six watch towers, which watched over the camp for prisoners trying to escape.In addition to watch towers, there was a guard room where the guards would relax on their break. In the guard room, guards would joke and laugh about what they had done to prisoners that day. To stay alive, the prisoners would have to perform tasks each day. These included rolling the streets, plantation work, the gravel pit, and shoveling snow in the winter.

Rolling the streets was when a horse cart would be attached to several starving prisoners SS-men whipped them to pull the cart. Another job was the plantation worker, whose job was to keep the camp clean and looking nice.They would have to plant flower beds around mass graves, make walkways into the camp, and keep the kitchens and dorms looking decent. Still yet, there was the gravel pit, where prisoners would have to break up huge boulders into gravel. While they were doing this, vicious dogs were trained to attack the prisoners by being released into the gravel pit to bark at and bite prisoners to speed up their effort. Along with the jobs prisoners had to complete, there were also disturbing punishments that went along with them.

For example, if a prisoner mouthed back at one of the SS-men they would have to stand in one spot for hours on end in the rain, snow or other harsh conditions. Another form of punishment was the “rope. ” During the “rope” the prisoner was hung so their heels would not touch the ground. This made the prisoner stand on their toes to stay alive. This lasted usually around 2 hours per incident. The “rope” was used to punish people who were caught collecting evidence, which was on a no tolerance level.

Whipping happened almost on a daily basis.Prisoners were whipped for anything from mouthing back to not doing there work right, to even looking at a guard the wrong way. Being whipped was looked at by prisoners as the easy way out. Most considered the gassing of prisoners to be the worst punishment of all.

Gassing occurred in groups, prisoners were gassed for various reasons, but mostly for refusing to do work. To be gassed prisoners were sent to Linz, Austria. There were many precautions in place to prevent prisoners from escaping. The camp had barbed wire charged with electricity to prevent climbing.If prisoners made it through the barbed wire they had to swim across a canal that was extremely hard to cross.

It was almost impossible to escape. If a prisoner escaped the ones that remained behind suffered the punishment. The rule was that if one escapes, ten must die, and that was carried out frequently. On the camp there was a crematorium, which was there for easier disposal of the dead bodies. The crematorium was originally built in a wooden barracks on the camp itself. Then later, a polish priest, who was taught the trade of building, re-designed the crematorium.

The new crematorium was built on the west side of the camp. It was a stone building that was supposed to last a very long time. The construction of the building was completed in 1943. There was a gas chamber installed in this building, but it was never actually used. The gas chamber was used more as a threat, than anything else.

The crematorium was continuously burning bodies, and the smell filled the air constantly. The concentration camps were looked as a good thing at first. They were supposed to help the German economy. In the end concentration camps killed a lot of the innocent people, and made things in Germany worse.