Dachau Concentration Camp - 12 years of horror

In early 1933, National Socialists came to power in Germany. In October, after the burning of the Reichstag, Hitler received special powers and began decisive actions to establish the order he had conceived in the country.

The Dachau Concentration Camp was the first institution of mass re-education of the population, for the beginning of German. The place was chosen in Bavaria, near Munich, almost in the suburbs (just 17 km), on the site of an abandoned factory.

The Social Democrats and Communists, who failed to form a parliamentary coalition for various reasons, formed the basis of the special contingent. Besides them, homosexuals, prostitutes, criminals and all those whom the Nazi leadership considered as antisocial elements pleased homesteads. In all, the first race consisted of five thousand people. At the same time, a mocking slogan appeared on the gate: "Labor makes it free".

In the first years, the Dachau concentration camp really became a place of "forging". Former Communists and Social Democrats, after working for several months in the open air with a strict diet, often expressed sympathy for National Socialism. Such released and provided an opportunity to prove loyalty in deed.

In 1934 it turned out that more camps are required. The Dachau Concentration Camp became the forge of personnel for the personnel of the penitentiary system of the entire Reich.

Then, after the all-German pogrom, which received the poetic name "Crystal Night", seriously took up the Jewish population. The first ten thousand were brought here in the 38th.

With the outbreak of World War II , the national composition of the prisoners expanded. All over Germany and abroad (in the occupied territories), new institutions were created that were no longer intended for re-education. People were brought here to kill.

The Dachau Concentration Camp was the place where industrial methods of killing "human material" were used. Everything that could be of value to the military economy was disposed of - dental crowns, hair, clothes, ashes, remaining from the burned bodies. But this is not all - prisoners were used to conduct experiments on the study of borderline regimes of the organism within the limits of survival and beyond them. To this end, the prisoners were subjected to hypothermia, they were tested with poisonous substances and protective equipment, they were given deadly injections of toxins. In quarantine blocks, observations were made of contaminated phlegmon. Butchers from the SS cut people, fixing their death agony.

At the end of April 1945, the units of the Seventh American Army approached the outskirts of Munich . On their way was Dachau (concentration camp). Photos made by US soldiers immediately after the release of prisoners, recorded mountains of corpses, skeletons, skin-tight. The guards preferred to surrender without a fight. Then came what no one expected. The SS men were taken to the fence and shot without exception. This mass execution was not even a revenge - American soldiers simply killed nonhumans like mad bloodthirsty animals.

In the post-war years much has been done to perpetuate the memory of the victims of Dachau. Concentration camp-museum, however, in the opinion of surviving prisoners, does not give a complete picture of the real atmosphere of the "factory of death." The blocks are neatly repaired, plastered and whitewashed, inside - cleanliness and order. Only cold crematorium furnaces and mocking iron letters above the entrance remind us of the horrors of the twelve years of Nazi rule and two hundred thousand people turned here into ashes and yellowish smoke.