Concentration Camp Dachau

The Dreaded Story of Dachau A concentration camp refers to a camp or closed area where people are detained under brutal conditions usually having no access to legal rights of arrest and imprisonment that would normally be accepted in a democracy. Concentration camps played a large part in the mass killing of Jews in Europe lead by Adolf Hitler. An example of a concentration camp is Dachau. During the World War II, Jews were separated into two groups the healthy and the unhealthy. The unhealthy were immediately sent to an extermination camp where they were killed in gas chambers and had harsh experiments performed on them. The healthy were sent to concentration camps, where they would work until they died of starvation, or they earned their freedom, which did not happen often. On Wednesday, March 21, 1933 an article in Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten, a German newspaper, stated that “the first concentration camp would be open in the vicinity of Dachau…and it can accommodate up to 5,000 people.” Initially, Dachau was seen as a good thing, it was looked at as in the best interest for the German people to contain the Jewish people in an area that they could not escape. The Germans claimed the Jewish people were to blame for everything wrong occurring in Germany. Dachau was rectangular shaped, 990 ft. wide by 1980 ft. long. It had a moist, foggy, climate. On the prison camp there were 34 over crowded barracks. Each barracks was thirty feet long by thirty three feet wide. The barracks were separated into two parts; each part had two dormitories, two living rooms, and one wash room. Each barracks was supposed to hold ninety people, and divided equally between the dormitories. The living room in the apartment had forty five closets to hold what little possessions the prisoners had, and each dormitory had forty five beds stacked above each other. The camp was originally designed to hold 5,000 people but after 1942, there were never less than 12,000. Due to

Cited: Page Distel, Barbara, and Ruth Jakusch, eds. Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945. 17th ed. Munich: Comité International De Dachau, Brussels Lipp GmbH, 1978. Neuhäusler, Johannes. What Was It Like in the Concentration Camp At Dachau? Munich: Roch-Druck, 2000. "The Early Days of Dachau." The History Place. 1997. 6 Nov. 2007 .