Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Tour from Munich

All over an exhausted Europe, victorious Allied soldiers set free the desperate survivors of camp after camp. The diseased, the starving and the barely alive emerged to tell a shocked and disbelieving world of the full horror of a network of systematised murder, torture, degradation and exploitation that had first been conceived and set in motion 12 years earlier in 1933 in Dachau. This was the “parent” KZ (Konzentrationslager).

KZ Dachau was the “Academy of Terror”, the originator, role model and training ground for the vast order of brutality that spread over half of Europe in the wake of the armies of the Third Reich, which ultimately culminated in one of history’s greatest crimes: the Final Solution.

While each camp was responsible for its own particular form of barbarism, what set Dachau apart is that almost everything that happened in the system as a whole happened at some level there. There, human medical experiments were conducted. To there, Soviet prisoners were sent to be mown down in mass executions. From there, Jewish prisoners were transported to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.