Our hotel in Munich is among the majority in that it doesn’t have air conditioning; the hotels seem to not have it and not need it. So we slept with our window open and quite a bit of street noise until it really quiets down - sometime after midnight. Sudden, loud sounds wake me up, but I fall back asleep pretty quickly. Aileen wears ear plugs, so the outdoor sounds (and my alleged snoring) don’t bother her.
We were both awake before the alarm at 7:30 local time, with sunny skies and the temperature in the upper 60’s. We got up, dressed, packed my backpack with what we thought we’d need for the day, and left the hotel around 9:00. We headed toward the S-Bahn station to catch an S2 train toward the Concentration Camp at Dachau, although we stopped at Muller’s Coffee Shop for zwei milchkaffes, ein mohrbeere kuchen, und ein Johannesbeere kuchen (two coffees with milk, one blackberry Danish (for Aileen), and one red currant Danish (for me)).
We found the right train, headed the right direction, and arrived at the S-Bahn station in Dachau around 10:15. We got on the connecting bus to the Concentration Camp memorial as it was waiting, and we weren’t sure how far it was to the Camp (it turned out to be ~3 km away, so it was a good call to take the bus). We arrived around 10:30, rented two headsets that provide an audio guide to the site, and started walking. Note: the Fraulein distributing the audio headsets spoke at least five languages fluently; in the U.S., I would have expected her to be working as some sort of translator for Bosch, GE, or some other multi-national conglomerate. Here, she passes out audio headsets all day….
The Camp dates back to 1933; shortly after assuming power, Hitler had the camp built to serve as a detention / “reeducation” center for enemies of the state – which included just about anyone that the SS had a grudge against. The part of the site where the prisoners were held occupies an area about 5 city blocks by 8 city blocks, or about 400 acres. (This is probably only 10% of the total area of the site; the rest was used primarily for SS housing and training.)
You enter the Concentration Camp area through the same Entrance Gate (Jourhaus) used by the prisoners; the gate retains the “Arbeit Macht Frei: wording that would later be copied and used at other Concentration and Death Camps.
To your right is the building that served as the Maintenance Building; new arrivals were processed through here, meals were prepared here, and the showers were also in this building. Built in 1937-38 by the prisoners themselves, this building currently houses the museum for the Memorial.
To your left are two reconstructed barracks, plus the original footings of the other 32 barracks. (All of the original barracks were torn down sometime after 1945; it was unclear if this was done by the Americans or the Germans.) This first photo shows one of the two barracks; it measures 10 meters by 100 meters:
This second photo shows the view from the opposite corner of the camp; the barracks in the first photo is at the far distant corner of the site:
The 34 barracks were designed to hold 6,000 prisoners. By 1939, the camp population was close to 20,000, and when the U.S. Army came to liberate the camp on April 29, 1945, there were over 45,000 prisoners in the camp – only because in late 1944, the Germans began worrying that the camp would soon be liberated and they would lose some of their slave labor, so they marched 16,000 camp prisoners to the Alps,with over half of the prisoners not surviving the trip. This means that at its height, nearly 63,000 prisoners – one-third of the population of Aurora - were held in a facility of less than 40 square city blocks.
The museum provides great details about the economic and political conditions that led up to the rise of the Third Reich: how the price of one egg rose from 0.08 marks in early 1933 to over 80 billion marks by late 1934; many people were unemployed; and people were looking for a way out of the disaster caused by unsupportable reparations payments after the end of the first World War. It also provides information about the incomprehensible atrocities of the SS; I’m somewhat sorry to admit that it just becomes sort of mind-numbing after a couple of hours.
Suffice it to say that it was a VERY moving experience. It also provided a lot of background information leading up to the events of World War II – not trying to justify any of the atrocities, but trying to explain how events happened.
We returned our headsets, ate two apples that we purchased at a market before leaving Munich that morning, and caught the bus / S-Bahn, arriving back at City Center around 3:45 p.m. – so, what the heck, we’re only moderately tired and there’s still daylight left – so let’s head out to Olympic Park – site of the 1972 Summer Games!
We made it to the site by around 4:15, and walked toward the main facilities: the Olympic Pool (in use today as an AWESOME health club facility), the main indoor arena (under construction & locked), and the outdoor stadium (also locked as they were setting up for some type of sport automobile show). So we climbed Olympic Hill just south of the park to get an overall view of the Olympic Park (and BMW World Headquarters, just to the right of the Olympic Tower):
Now we were really tired – and hungry – so we rode the U3 train back to Marienplatz, and stopped at one of the first restaurants we saw for Italian food. Aileen had Spaghetti Bolognese, while I want *completely* wild and had… Penne Bolognese. We were both quite thirsty, and worried that any “local beverages” would result in pounding headaches, so we had two Cokes. (You can take the boy out of the country, but you can’t….)
We walked with diminishing vigor back to the hotel. Aileen had lights out by around 9:30, while I stayed up another 2 hours checking E-mail and trying to get my Skype connection to work. I can place calls and hear Karen clearly – but she can’t hear me. We may just have to “go back” to communicating by E-mail; ah the good old days. And now it’s lights out for me at 11:35; see you tomorrow.
Distance traveled: 24 miles (rail), 8 miles (foot), 32 miles for the day, 4,631 miles so far this trip.
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