Saturday 1

On Saturday we visited the memorial site of the infamous concentration camp at Dachau, a small town on the outskirts of Munich. We went along with a tour group of about 20 people, which was a good idea as it helped to understand the significance of the things we were seeing.

Here is the entry gate which shows the Nazi regime's empty claim that hard work at the camps would be rewarded. Apparently the limited nature of the tours given by the Nazis to the Red Cross meant that this camp was recognised as an accepted "labour camp" by them until the early 1940s, even though it was set up in the 1930s and the brutality of the camp had been clear from the start.

Here is a sculpture made for the site of the new memorial to commemorate the victims. There are also individual memorials for each nationality and religion.


Here is a statue outside the site of the Dachau gas chamber, which was built later on in the war. The man's posture symbolises freedom and defiance, and the inscription translates roughly as "To honour the dead --- to warn the living".


On the way home from the train station we walked via the Beethovenplatz, which was quite disappointing to me; the most Beethoven-related feature there was not a plaque or a statue but rather the following cheesy real estate advertisement: