Dachau

Today we took a tour of Dachau, which was the first ever concentration camp created by the Nazis. It opened just a few weeks after Hitler gained the emergency powers from the Senate and was in operation for twelve years from 1933 to 1945. It was used as a model for all the other concentration camps that the nazis created. We took a tour that the hostel offered and it was very informative. Seeing this place was quite an experience, and it is very sobering experience, and thinking of the atrocities that people do to one another just makes you rather sick.

This is the entrance gate at Dachau. Arbeit macht frei means work will make you free. It was something the germans did mostly as a joke amongst themselves.

This is a reconstruction of one of the bunk houses They tore all of the original ones down not too long after the camp was liberated. They said it was for safety issues, but our guide told us that the general feeling of the Bavarian government at the time was to repress and forget the history.

This is a guard tower. They were prevented from being torn down by one of the survivors who would go and sit in front of the bulldozers.

These are where they original bunk houses were.

The trench and the electric fence

the hallway and a bunch of cells.

The crematorium

This was the first memorial piece that was placed in the camp in 1950. The survivors don't like this because it shows him wearing a coat and shoes, neither of which they had. This is another example of the bavarian government trying to repress and re-write past.

At Dachau there are about six separate memorials which is kind of sad, because they are all rather political. All the churches try and get their memorial in there somewhere and they try to make theirs better than the others. Anyway, this one is the largest, and the main one, it was comissioned by the survivors foundation and designed by a concentration camp survivor.

This is part of the same memorial. These shapes are the patches that the prisoners would wear to show what type of prisoner they were. For example, the red triangle means that they were a political prisoner, meaning they were passing out propaganda or were a socialist or something. The ones that have a gold triangle with them means that they are a jew, so the red and gold star of david looking one means they were jewish and a political enemy. I don't remember what they all stand for, purple was jehova's witnesses, the orange bar meant that they had been released and then put back in.  There are three patches that were missing from the wall. The black triangle, which were the Gypsys, the pink triangle which were the homosexuals, and the green triangle, which were the hard criminals that the nazis would pull out of regular prisons and make kind of like commanders over the rest of the prisoners. These patches are not included because the survivors committee said that they didn't want to be associated with “People like that.” I find it extrememly ironic that these people who suffered in these camps because of religious and racial intolerance, would be intolerant and judge other people, when they suffered the exact same thing.

 

Anyway, Dachau was a good experience.

Tomorrow we are leaving for Prague, where we will be visiting Britny!!! I am sooooo excited to see her. This morning I flipped the breaker for the third time since I've been in europe, because I was trying to use my flat iron. 

No good.

I was afraid that it ruined my converter and I was going to have to buy another one, but it still works, so all is well. The only problem is that now my hair is going to have to continue being au naturel. I hope you guys realize what a big deal this is. My hair is naturally insane. No one every sees my hair in it's perfectly natural state. And now I have no hair dryer, no flat iron, and next to no product. 

yeah, prepare yourselves for pictures. I may be wearing a hat for the rest of summer. 

P.S. Chelsea still hasn't shaved her legs and now they are ridiculously long and she looks like a man.

p.p.s. Everyone thinks I am seventeenish and it is driving me insane. if any of you ever tell me I look young again I will do something unreasonable. 

I AM TWENTY!!