Dachau

 10/6: We left Munich and headed to Dachau to visit the  concentration camp memorial site. When Bob and I were planning this part of our trip a few months ago, we had many long discussions about if we should take the kids to a concentration camp, and if we should go to Auschwitz. We looked at the recommendations of Dachau and Auschwitz, considered tons of people’s thoughts and experiences from online forums, and then tried to make the best decisions for our kids and family.

We decided the kids are too young to visit Auschwitz, but from what we read, Simone met the minimum age limit to visit Dachau. As a family we read about Dachau beforehand and tried to prepare ourselves for what we would see.

The entrance to the camp

A memorial for those that died here

A model of the camp with the bronze sculpture in the background

The original door to the camp - lost for many years but recovered

The central bronze sculpture shows human figures entangled in barbed wire

What an awful, heartbreaking place to experience. There are so many thoughts and emotions, and I'm thankful for all the family discussions and experiences we've had surrounding WWII (our full day tour of Normandy, visiting Eagles Nest with its extensive museum outside Salzburg, and taking the third Reich tour in Munich). That knowledge base gave us valuable background for our time at Dachau.

I asked my family what stood out the most for them:

Simone: was in awe of the square that the prisoners stood in every day. It was meant to hold 6,000, but at the end there were 30,000+. She could not wrap her head around that many people squeezed into the place we were standing.

Quinn: took so many notes, and read them to us later. We so appreciated how he took his time and wanted to take it all in. He came to me halfway through and gave me the biggest hug.

Bob: could not believe all the satellite concentration camps that existed. We stood in front of this huge wall with a map of Germany, and there seemed to be hundreds of camps listed. We knew about the ones that most have heard of, but we had no idea of the incredible number of subsidiary camps that existed.

Me: The enormous, incomprehensible number of people that participated in the evil at Dachau and at all of the camps. I cannot understand the amount of people who came to their 'job' every day, committed such heinous crimes, and then left to go home to their friends and family...day after day. These people at the camp that performed evil, cruel medical 'experiments' on prisoners. How could SO many people behave in this way?

On our Normandy tour, we learned that the paratrooper that got stuck on the church steeple was brought in  by the Germans and not killed. I expressed surprise that they didn't kill him, and our guide, Dale, was shocked that I would think they would kill him. Well, I said, it was a war zone, and he was the enemy. Dale said no, that even in war times, that soldiers don't just kill indiscriminately. The ones that do are psychopaths/sociopaths, and the number of those people in the general population are small.

So certainly Hitler was a psychopath/sociopath, but what about ALL the others? I will be thinking about this for a very long time.