Dachau Concentration Camp Research Paper

Germany´s first concentration camp opens its doors to the public eye, in order, to remember and pay tribute to the passed away prisoners.

Not only was the Dachau concentration camp a prison, it was also a training camp for the SS concentration camps guards from all around Germany. The prisoners had to perform forced labor and medical experiments were performed on them by German physicians. Examples of the experiments were decompression chambers, malaria, and tuberculosis experiments, as well as hypothermia experiments and testing new medicine in general. The Dachau concentration camp was labeled as the “model concentration camp for all the others that followed. Nevertheless, the area of Dachau didn’t only include the prison. It included a leader school of the

economic and civil service and the medical school of the SS. The KZ (“Konsentrationslager”, in German) was at the time called a “protective custody camp and took up half the area of the complex in Dachau.

Theodor Eicke- the first commander of the Dachau concentration camp. The commander changes 10 times after Eicke. In total, Dachau held at least 188,000 thousand prisoners captive, between 1933 and 1945. At least 28,00 registered people died between this time. The Nazi´s main target were the Jews, having a dead set vision of the Master Race. But the types of prisoners were not only Jewish people. Prisoners were, but not limited to, Gypsies, homosexuals, and disabled individuals. In the early stages of the Third Reich, imprisoned were only communists and socialists. However, this changed in 1935, when racially inferior were also captured.
Prisoners were required to wear color-coded triangles on their jackets so that their background could be identified by all guards. The other purpose of the jackets were also to pit the different groups against each other. Political prisoners, communists, socialists, and trade unionists showed red triangles. Green triangles were visible on repeated common criminals. Romas, and others who the Nazi found “asocial” wore black triangles.

Homosexuals wore pink triangles and Jehovah’s witnesses wore purple.

The letters on the jacket should also indicate the nationality of the prisoner. An example of this would be that the Polish would have a P on their jacket, and the French an F.

In early 1937, the SS forced the captured to construct a large compound of building on the grounds of the original camp. This construction work was later completed in mid-August. The camp remained unchanged until the year of 1945.

The Dachau Concentration Camp was originally set up on March 22nd in 1933. The Americans liberated the camp on April 29th, 1945. The memorial site was established in 1965 and an actual exhibition was created between 1996 and this year.

Adolf Hitler opened the camp to be used as a jail. Another purpose of the prison is to spread fear about it, so every citizen would behave in order to not be locked up in one of the dreadful labor sites.

Visitors who have been called their experience “thought provoking at the same time sobering, no matter what emotion you feel, the moment one steps into this place, you end up counting your blessings and being thankful for the life that you´ve been given.”

-Poporal64 via

Tripadvisor