Day 14 - Wednesday June 22 - Dachau

Spent a very sobering day north of Munich in the city of Dachau where the remains of the Nazi concentration camp can be seen. It started out as a SS training facility and evolved into a detention facility for political dissidents, homosexuals, religious opponents to Hitler, and eventually just about anyone who opposed the Nazi regime. In all, people from 34 nations ended up in the brutal work camp. It was here that the SS practiced and refined their torture techniques ("Academy of Terror") which were then utilized in the other concentration camps. About 25% of the original area of the concentration camp has been maintained as a memorial and museum to the survivors. A lot of German students were seen at the site apparently as an effort by today's generation to remind them of an era that should have never happened. Technically, Dachau was not classified as a "Death Camp" like Auschwitz. Officially, it was a "Work Camp", but the results were the same in that many of those incarcerated at Dachau were killed by simply working them to death. The government officially accounts for somewhere between 42,000 and 43,000 deaths from 1933 to 1945 at Dachau, whereas Auschwitz accounted for more and 4 million deaths during the same period.