Dachau footnotes

Artwork on a Dachau kindergarten (2025):
"A colorful mix makes us unique."

I've been coming to Germany with S every year or year and a half since 1991. This July, I visited the Konzentrationslager Dachau memorial site for the fifth or sixth time. It was the first time that I followed the Path of Remembrance, a walking route with 12 informational panels in both German and English, that runs from the Dachau train station to the KZ. The path was created in 2007 by the City of Dachau. The KZ memorial opened in 1965.

I incorporated two additional sites on my route: the SS shooting range in Hebertshausen, about 2 km north of KZ Dachau, where, in 1941 and 1942, over 4,000 Soviet prisoners of war were executed en masse; and the Dachau Waldfriedhof (wooded cemetery), which includes memorials and graves for ~1,300 KZ Dachau victims who died from consequences of their imprisonment after liberation.

I visited because "nie wieder" ("never again") is meaningless without remembering, and because the regime in my own country hasn't so much forgotten as decided the SS playbook is one they want to emulate.

Photos, taken en route, and food for thought are below, including observations in footnotes. Images are not intended to be comprehensive; for more in-depth information, including virtual tours, historical details, and maps, visit the official website of the KZ Dachau Memorial. 

Dachau's train station has undergone many renovations since the 1930s

"Over 200,000 prisoners were transported to the Dachau concentration camp and its subsidiary camps between 1933 and 1945. The prisoners often arrived here at the Dachau railway station. In full view of the civilian population, SS men beat and drove the prisoners to the concentration camp.¹ The prisoners included political opponents of the Nazi regime, Jews, Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and persons the Nazis persecuted as 'asocials' or 'criminals.' During Worls War II (1939-1945) the SS kept persons from all over Europe imprisoned in the Dachau concentration camp." (Path of Remembrance, Panel 1)

Stolperstein for Anton Felber

Here lived

Anton Felber

Born 1902

Seized 1938

'Preventive detention'² 

Dachau

1939 Flossenbürg

Murdered 20 October 1939

The Stolperstein project is an international project to memorialize the Jewish, Sinti/Roma, political, homosexual, Jehovah's Witness, and euthanasia victims of Nazism in the years leading up to and during World War II. Some critics believe that the brass memorial markers, embedded in sidewalks in front of victims' last known residences, invite people to trample on the names and memory of victims. The project's organizers intend for the brass markers "to argue against the mass extermination by the National Socialists by restoring to the tormented people their name, their face, and a place in the heart of society." In the location where Anton Felber once lived, a kindergarten now stands.

Death March monument

Hier führte in den letzten Kriegstagen im April 1945 der Leidensweg der KZ-Häftlinge aus den Todeslagern Kaufering/Landsberg vorbei ins Ungewisse. 

Here, in the last days of the war in April 1945, the suffering path of the concentration camp prisoners from the death camps Kaufering/Landsberg passed into the unknown.

This memorial sculpture, by Hubertus von Pilgrim, was erected in 2001 and is one of 22 copies commemorating towns along the KZ-Dachau death march; the first was erected in Gauting in 1989; a copy is also at the Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem in Jerusalem.

Detail from Panel 6: signpost with anti-Semitic caricatures

"Here signposts with anti-Semitic caricatures indicated the two sections of the Dachau camp grounds:

    - The actual concentration camp with the prisoner camp, crematoria, camp commandant's office, and guard quarters.

    - The SS drill camp with barracks and training rooms." (Path of Remembrance, Panel 6)

With these signposts, NSDAP aimed for an intentionally dehumanizing and grotesque effect.³ 

-----

KZ Dachau grounds:

Arbeit macht frei : Work sets you free

The phrase Arbeit macht frei comes from an 1873 novel by Lorenz Diefenbach and alludes to John 8:31-32: you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.

"May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted Nazism help to unite the living for the defense of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow men." 

The former maintenance building

The main documentary exhibit is located inside the former maintenance building.

Close up on parallel timelines of the Third Reich and KZ Dachau

Adolf Hitler was appointed Reichskanzler on January 30, 1933. On March 22, 1933, Dachau opened as a concentration camp for political prisoners.⁴

A 1932 election poster for the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Workers' Party, a.k.a. the Nazi party) declared Hitler to be Unsere letzte Hoffnung (our last hope).⁵ 

Excerpts from "The Road to Dictatorship":

January 30: Hitler is appointed Reich Chancellor...⁴

February 28: Fundamental rights are revoked...⁶

March 9: The state governments are forced into line with the NSDAP...⁷

March 21: ...'Special Courts' are set up for political offenses, a decree is passed against the spreading of 'untrue claims' about the government.⁸ The first concentration camps are established⁴

March 24: The Reichstag gives powers to government allowing it to pass laws and change the constitution without the approval of parliament...⁹

April 7: Jewish and 'unreliable' civil servants are dismissed under the 'Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service'¹⁰

Former site of Row 15 of the barracks. Only Row 1 of the barracks remains. 

In the distance, the first row of barracks, with the maintenance building visible behind it.

Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel

The exterior back wall of the memorial chapel, a plaque notes that "here in Dachau, every third victim was a Pole. One of every two Polish priests was martyred. Their holy memory is venerated by their fellow prisoners of the Polish clergy." 

At the time of liberation, about 30% of prisoners in Dachau and its subcamps were Jewish.

Detail from Panel 12: "Return from the plantation" (1955)
by Hans Quaeck, a KZ Dachau inmate from 1941-1945

Arbeit macht frei.

"In 1938 concentration camp prisoners were forced to build an herb garden (plantation)... The SS guards marched the prisoners to work on the large open-air site under abusive threats and blows, and prisoners were arbitrarily shot 'while attempting to escape.' Less brutal working conditions reigned only in the buildings and greenhouses. There a work detail of draftsmen was supposed to produce a plant collection for Himmler. At the risk of losing their lives, some of the prisoners managed to depict the crimes committed by SS guards in secret notes." (Path of Remembrance, Panel 12) 

-----

The SS shooting range in Hebertshausen is across the Amper river from KZ Dachau. A monument remembers the 4,000 Soviet POWs who were murdered here.

"Pamphlet 'The Subhuman,' publisher: Reichsführer SS, Berlin 1941/42. The murky colors of the brochure evoke an image of extremely brutal and cruel Soviet 'subhumans.' The inflammatory pamphlet was to fuel the feelings of impending threat posed by the 'Bolshevist danger from the East' and justify the racial-ideological war of annihilation against the Soviet Union." (Excerpt from Hebertshausen Commemorative Site Panel, "The War of Annihilation against the Soviet Union")

Names of known victims. The list isn't very long.

Names of some of the known victims

-----

"Buried [in the Waldfriedhof] were prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp who in the months following liberation died from the consequences of their imprisonment. Victims of the death marches are also amongst the some 1,300 persons interred... " (Waldfriedhof Panel "Memorials Waldfriedhof Dachau")

Past and present

The KZ Dachau Memorial's website reports that "between 1933 and 1945, around 41,500 persons died of hunger, exhaustion, and disease, the direct result of being tortured, or were brutally murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and its subcamps." 41,500 is ~88% of the current population of the city Dachau.

I've read objections to comparisons between Nazi concentration camps during World War II and what is happening now with ICE "detention centers" in the U.S.--that it's offensive to compare the systematic slaughter of 6 million Jews to the imprisonment of "illegal" (and yo, legal) aliens (and yo, some U.S. citizens) at Alligator Alcatraz and other prisons. A reminder: Dachau originated to contain political prisoners, and the descent into Fascism did not happen overnight. Democracy is fragile, and the U.S. is well down the road toward Fascism.

-----

¹ What would you do if you saw armed masked kidnappers abducting someone off the street? Below left: calling the police to report kidnappings backfires when police aid ICE. Below center: a "red card" notifies non-citizens of their Constitutional rights, which makes little difference when the government intentionally ignores those rights. Below right: The President of the United States, who swore an oath to uphold the Constitution, says he doesn't know if he's required to uphold the Constitution.

   

² Sicherungsverwahrung means "preventive detention" or "protective custody." It was used by the NSDAP as a way to imprison people without legal due process.

 

³ The U.S. Department of Homeland Security aims for an intentionally and dehumanizing grotesque effect. Below left: a screenshot from the official Instagram page of the US DHS. Below center: a signpost marking a KZ outside of Ochopee, FL. Below right: screenshot of merch in the Republican Party of Florida's online shop. 

    

⁴ Donald Trump was inaugurated on January 20, 2025. By March 17, news media were reporting on deportations of "gang members" to CECOT in El Salvador, a prison known for its human-rights violations. In mid-April, Trump expressed his desire to deport "homegrowns." Well before the 2024 election, Trump was threatening retribution against his political opponents.

  

⁵ In the U.S., MAGA Republicans promoted the cultish idea that only Trump could save the country. Below left: a vanity press book for sale on Amazon on Friday July 18, 2025, that has since been removed. Below right: campaign flag for sale on Amazon.

  

⁶ In the U.S., fundamental rights, including the right to Due Process, Freedom of Speech, Freedom of the Press, Freedom from Cruel and Unusual Punishment, and Right to Counsel, are ignored:

  

⁷ In the U.S., the executive branch attempts to force state governments into line with anti-DEI and anti-immigrant priorities: 

 

⁸ In the U.S., despite claims by the executive branch that their focus is on the "worst of the worst," Politifact reports that the majority of Alligator Alcatraz’s detainees do not have U.S. criminal convictions. 

  

⁹ In the U.S., the Republican majority Supreme Court and Congress cede powers to the presidency:

  

¹⁰ In the U.S., the executive branch insists on political loyalty.

  

¹¹ In the U.S., some people ask "how can ICE employees who commit these crimes sleep at night?" This is how: by believing the people they are kidnapping / harassing / abusing are subhuman.