Dachau

While Alisha's parents were visiting, we visited the Nazi work camp in Dachau on a gray, cold Sunday afternoon, just northwest of Munich. They have preserved much of the camp and turned the main building into a museum chronicling the rise of Hitler and the Nazi's after the end of WWI through WWII, the work and concentration camps, the liberation of camps by American forces and the beginnings of the Nuremberg trials where senior officials were put on trial for their crimes. The museum was filled with chilling pictures and reports from the atrocities that occurred in the camp and throughout the rest of Germany and the conquered territories. Dachau was the first labor camp for the Nazi party and served as a model for the rest of them - which when including the smaller and subsidiary camps, numbered in the thousands. Keep in mind, though, that while thousands of people died at Dachau, it was not a concentration camp where people were sent specifically for death. There are several pictures of the city of Munich, which was the Third Reich's first headquarters, before they moved to Berlin. You can see a picture of a tall gothic looking building with a giant swastika flag draped off of the front. That is the Munich Rathaus, or City Hall. That building is only about 4 blocks from our apartment and is now at the heart of the tourist district in downtown Munich. Germany and Munich have come a long way since those days, though, and while you can find museums and memorials all over the country commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, the country and its citizens are one of the more progressive and forward thinking populations in the world.