The Dachau extermination concentration camp is considered the beginning of the systematic extermination of people by the Nazis. The National Socialists set up the concentration camp less than 20 kilometers from Munich. 90 years ago today on March 22, 1933, less than two months after Adolf Hitler seized power on January 30, the first prisoners arrived at the camp. “Dachau – the meaning of this name cannot be erased from German history,” Holocaust survivor Eugen Kogon (1903-1987) later said. The respected political scientist and journalist stated: “Dachau represents all the later concentration and extermination camps that the National Socialists created on the territory of what was then Germany.”

Indeed, Dachau served as a model for other camps. Historian Wolfgang Benz once said that at Dachau “the operating regulations that were later applied to all subsequent concentration camps were drawn up.” And also that “in Dachau, as in the later camps, above the entrance gate was placed the inscription “Work sets you free”, with the sole purpose of mocking, oppressing and demeaning the prisoners”. On the periphery of the extermination camp, outside Munich, there were 140 smaller ones, in which the prisoners worked on building roads or other projects.

About 25% of the prisoners were Jews

The National Socialists transported to Dachau opponents of the Nazi regime, communists, Jews, Sindi and Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, but also people of the Catholic and evangelical churches. In the twelve years until the camp was liberated by the US Army on April 29, 1945, more than 200,000 people from all over Europe were held at Dachau, crammed into small spaces. By the end of the war over 32,000 people had lost their lives. Recent research even places the dead at over 41,000 deaths. About 25% were Jews, of whom at least 11,250 did not survive.

A special feature of the camp was the so-called “chaplains’ section”. In 1940, the National Socialists gathered in Dachau clerics from various denominations and countries from other camps of the German Reich. Most of them were Catholic priests, many of whom came from Poland. A total of about 3,000 clergy were imprisoned in Dachau. When typhus broke out in the camp in early 1945, priests volunteered to care for the sick. As a result many priests lost their lives. Even weeks after the camp was liberated by American soldiers, the camp remained tightly closed and under strict quarantine due to the epidemic. More than 10,000 people, skeletonized by deprivation and hardship, died of typhus.

More than 1,000,000 visitors per year

The site of the former camp and the monument, which was completed in 1965, are visited every year by about 1,000,000 people from all over the world. Few buildings survive from the camp’s period of operation. During a visit by European rabbis last summer, Bavarian Interior Minister Joachim Hermann announced that the monument would be expanded. In addition, buildings that are currently used for other purposes and belonged to the Dachau concentration camp will be included in the museum facilities “because the demand and the number of visitors have increased significantly,” the German minister said. The expansion of the monument is expected to be completed by 2025 at the latest.

For 90-year-old Charlotte Knobloch, Holocaust survivor and head of Munich’s Jewish community, Dachau remains the place where “barbarity in the name of Germany” began. He insists that memory should be kept alive not only to defend the victims. In addition, he believes that Dachau is a constant reminder that “extremism from the left and right endangers religion, coexistence and freedom. It threatens everything we have created. We should stop those who in today’s Germany are once again speaking in favor of barbarism by promoting it violently.”

We saw the fact that even a monument like Dachau can be violently attacked in 2014. Unknown people then removed the central gate of the former camp with the inscription “Arbeit macht frei”. Two years passed before the stolen iron gate was found in Norway, but the reasons and circumstances of the theft were never known.