Sunday, May 15

Sunday was one of the more memorable days of the entire trip because we went to Dachau, the first concentration camp built during the Nazi regime in 1933. While it wasn’t an extermination camp like Auschwitz or Birkenau, tens of thousands of people still died in Dachau, but more from exhaustion rather than the gas chambers. Dachau was initially built to be the housing facilities for the workers who worked in the mines and built ammunition for the Nazis, and even advertised it to the public as a place where if one worked hard enough, they would be set free. But obviously that was very far from the truth. The atmosphere was unlike anything I had ever experienced. Last spring I visited Normandy and went to the D-Day beaches, but at least there the soldiers were dying a noble death, fighting for their country. In Dachau innocent men, women, and children were killed for the sole reason of being different. That’s what really got to me, is that I was in a place were there was so much death for absolutely no reason. What’s even worse is that by the time the Americans came and liberated the camp the Nazi’s didn’t have enough money to buy coal so they began just gassing the victims and throwing their dead bodies outside, one on top of the other. Overall there were about 3,000 dead bodies abandoned by the Nazis when the Americans came, and what I found really interesting is that the American troops forced the residents of the town of Dachau to walk through the camp and see what the atrocities their country committed that they probably had no idea about. After the tour of the camp we watched a very old and graphic film on Dachau, which many of us, including myself, could have gone without seeing as it only added to the emotional toll the camp had on us. The rest of the day we had to ourselves, and I think all of us worked on our projects with our groups as it was the last significant free time we had until we presented.