Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial

The quaint medieval town of Dachau, Germany has an array of beautiful sights to entice visitors, yet it has become a popular travel destination due to its ugly past. Dachau is the site of the Nazi regime’s first concentration camp and served as the model for the others that followed.

At least 41,500 people died at Dachau between 1933 and 1945 in increasingly gruesome circumstances as the Second World War progressed. Immediately after the war, the camp’s survivors committed to bringing their harrowing experiences to light through a series of provocative public exhibitions. The graphic nature of these presentations were criticized by both the local populace, who still held onto the widely publicized “clean camp” image, and the Bavarian government in the name of self-preservation. Meanwhile, the continuing evolution of the site into an internment camp and court for Nazi criminals, and eventually into a refugee camp, has resulted in a stripped-down and cleaned-up physical space, deceptively reconstructed over time. With foreign opinions at the forefront of concern, Bavarian authorities have likewise sterilized and manipulated the Dachau survivors' education and memorialization efforts through increasingly inhibitive guidelines. What visitors see today is little more than a highly curated and pristinely manicured shell of the original camp that dangerously obscures the collective memory of the camp's sordid history and the Holocaust in toto. In other words, what contemporary visitors will not see or learn at the former Dachau camp vastly exceeds what they will. Consequently, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site has unwittingly perpetuated the propagandized "clean camp" image the survivors originally sought to dispel, thus missing the mark as both a testament to Nazi atrocities and a memorial to its victims.

The Nazi regime opened its first concentration camp on March 22, 1933, on the outskirts of Dachau, Germany. What began as a detention camp for political prisoners soon became the template and training ground for others in what would become a vast network. As an internment camp for political prisoners, Dachau initially aimed to detain Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, clergymen, and other political dissidents. Eventually, "asocial" groups such as Roma, homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, and others were also targets for Dachau. After Kristallnacht, Jews, too, began arriving en masse. In the camp's twelve-year operation, the number of prisoners skyrocketed from the initial maximum capacity of 5,000 to an unmanageable 30,000+ by the time of liberation. During that time, Nazi officers subjected these prisoners to inhumane medical experiments, forced labor, starvation, disease, catastrophic living conditions, and various forms of torture and execution. It was this sheer depravity the camp's survivors sought to expose with the first postwar memorial site exhibitions.

However, this would not be the first time the Dachau concentration camp's inner workings were put on display. Historian Harold Marcuse notes, "Long before [Dachau] became a site memorializing Nazi atrocities, it was a showcase for the implementation of Nazi ideology."
As the model for the Nazi concentration camp system, regular tours occurred during the war to German and foreign officials alike. These visitors encountered nothing less than a scrupulously clean and orderly establishment reportedly designed to educate those with asocial behaviors to become productive members of the German racial collectivity. In reality, these tours were highly choreographed deceptions in which the exact locations visited, the activities witnessed, and the prisoners with which the visitors came into contact were all carefully selected and painstakingly prepped. Accounts of prisoner mistreatment and other incidents inside the camp were either justified as legal or necessary, described in fallacious terms, or discussed using only official euphemisms. Consequently, from the very beginning, Dachau (and thereby the more extensive concentration camp system) was publicized as "clean"—a deception Marcuse notes was "apparently quite successful" even "in spite of evidence to the contrary." He adds that "overwhelming evidence suggests that many Germans knew quite well what was going on in the camps" but that this "clean" vision of the camp "offered a convenient, exoneratory excuse" to claim ignorance after the war. Even upon seeing the evidence of Nazi atrocities with their own eyes following the camp's liberation, the greater population still clung to the "clean" camp image.

At one time, "crowds of Dachau residents along the streets and at the factory gate waited hours to get a glimpse of the camp's first detainees." As described by Marcuse, the crowds upon liberation consisted of army units, photographers, and journalists. During the Dachau trials in the months after liberation, camp survivors, assisted and supported by the U.S. Army, installed a documentary exhibition in the camp's crematorium. This exhibition emphasized the horrific reality of concentration camp life through gruesome photographs, detailed pamphlets, and life-sized mannequins demonstrating some of the camp's most notorious torture methods. The primary German reaction to this exhibition's depravity was a pressing need to extinguish the memory of this brutal past. Henceforth, this exhibition was gradually and quietly toned down; graphic images became fewer and replaced with softer themes or charcoal sketches. Over the years, this exhibition of Nazi crimes at Dachau took on many forms, as did the camp. In 1948, Dachau became a refugee camp, and many original structures and attributes were removed, replaced, or repurposed. Street lamps, flower beds, paved roads, restaurants, shops, and more such features became a part of the landscape.

From the beginning of Dachau's memorialization efforts, Bavarian authorities and locals alike attached a great deal of importance to the opinions of foreign visitors. One local taxi driver, as per Marcuse, opined in the early 1950s that "whether we like it or not, it attracts foreigners, and they would be disappointed if there were nothing to see." The key was figuring out how to give tourists something to see while minimizing the inhumanity of its not-so-distant past. The many slipshod attempts to reinterpret the history, lessen the potency of the exhibitions, and beautify the reimagined physical site make it clear that the impressions of foreign tourists were a priority over the survivors' wishes and the accuracy of historical memory in general.

As Dachau has evolved from a concentration camp to one of Germany's top tourist attractions, its administrators have significantly impeded visitors from grasping the horror of the former camp, thanks in large part to several strict guidelines. The first dictates that there shall be no recreations at the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site, and such edicts discount the fact that there's undeniable power in showing versus telling. In supporting a "staged authenticity" concept, landscape architect Dean MacCannell explains, "sustaining a firm sense of social reality requires some mystification." He goes on to say that while the "reality that is sustained through mystification may be a 'false' reality," such mystification is often "required to create a sense of 'real' reality." Ergo, by abstaining from historical, albeit fabricated, recreations of the camp's history, visitors are prevented from forming valuable impressions of the prisoners' day-to-day experiences, the depth of the Schutzstaffel's (SS) depravity, and the original functions of the few structures that do remain.

Likewise, while some aspects of the former camp are reconstructions, the new versions have been stripped of their most haunting features. For example, the gun emplacements and searchlights are missing from the rebuilt watchtowers that surround the prisoner camp, thus softening the gravity of the towers' significance and the camp's true horror. Similarly, the rebuilt barracks reveal nothing about the struggles of daily camp life. Their airiness and modern materials potentially serve to unravel visitors' preconceived notions of the overcrowded and unsanitary conditions the prisoners endured. Schmidl documents one former inmate referring to the reconstructed barracks as 'mountain cottages' and states: "In [them] does not live the horror of yesterday but the fear of contemporaries to get identified with...the monsters...of yesterday." Another of Dachau's guidelines is the exclusive use of text and pictures in place of artifacts, reproductions, and other sensory experiences. Finally, Dachau's strict guidelines often deny visitors the perspective of the perpetrators. For instance, Marcuse notes that visitors are not allowed to enter the watchtowers for "fear that young Germans, some of whom harbor arrogant attitudes, will identify with the power of the SS." All of these aspects distinguish visiting a site in person from reading about the site in a textbook. In this way, the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site has lost much of its potential to engage, educate, and effect change. Thus, by attempting to manipulate the outcome of one's visit, they deny visitors a well-rounded experience and the chance to learn history from all sides.

In contrast, the visitor experience at Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum differs from that at Dachau. Whereas the Bavarian government wanted to demolish as much of the Dachau camp as possible, postwar Poland took a vastly different approach. Charlesworth notes that the Polish parliament in 1947 declared that Auschwitz "would be 'forever preserved as a memorial to the martyrdom of the Polish nation and other peoples." As an indisputable icon of the Holocaust and the best-known concentration camp museum site, Auschwitz is the one to which all others find a comparison. Visitors encounter over a hundred original buildings at Auschwitz, including ditches, fencing, watchtowers, and railroad tracks with unloading platforms. They can see thousands of the prisoners' personal effects and other artifacts in haunting displays, including those connected to the extermination process.

Auschwitz is a concrete reflection of the general public's expectations and assumptions of the Holocaust and what constitutes a Nazi concentration camp. These expectations are missing when visiting Dachau. In fact, with its lack of discernible Holocaust imagery, deceiving reconstructions, and blatant attention to groundskeeping, Dachau paints the opposite picture. Though Dachau contains some of the relevant stereotypes (barbed wire, crematoria, "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate), Marcuse feels that it has "become a representation of the spotlessly 'clean camp' of Nazi propaganda, complete with a museum and churches," especially when compared to the prototypical concentration camp museum site that is Auschwitz.

As the gap between then and now expands, personal connections to the Holocaust and collective memory diminish and become even more pertinent than ever to give visitors the most accurate interpretation of the Nazi concentration camp system. By relying solely on text and pictures while refusing interpretive recreations and authentic reconstructions, Dachau deprives visitors of diverse perspectives and has inadvertently developed into a reverberation of the "clean camp" image of Nazi propaganda. According to professor James E. Young, visitors will never know Dachau's sordid past, only its well-groomed memorial. These visitors have come to Dachau, he says, "to 'see what it was like' [but] being told that this is not what Dachau was like, but only what its memorial is like, may leave some visitors bewildered as to why they have come at all."

Edited by Brad Poss and Laura Bailey

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