Off to the World Cup - 2006!!

Posted June 15, for the morning of June 14:

While we are in Munich, we wanted to visit the Dachau concentration camp, and decided to take the morning before the game as a good opportunity. It's hard to describe what the place is really like.

Only a hint of the brutality is still there in the buildings, but the museum has a powerful story of the history of the camp, and all the satellite camps that were organized around it. We passed from the old train tracks, through the famous "Arbeicht macht frei" gate, and on in to the roll call yard.

We walked through the museum in the old maintenance building, and then through one of the reconstructed barracks. It was surreal to see the bunks, and think of the people who had been crowded in to them. We walked from there on down the main camp street, between two beautiful rows of poplar trees planted long ago by the prisoners, and then through the back gate to the crematorium. We passed through the gas chamber in the new crematorium (used for executions, but not with gas) to the ovens, and then outside to the pistol range.

The camp had been set up within days after the Nazi seizure of power, and had grown to 40,000 inhabitants by 1940. In a deadly irony, the SS had made conditions so brutal that they were unable to supply enough healthy slave laborers to the German munitions factories. It was hard to explain to Kenny the way that a brutal system can actually work. He kept asking, "Well, what if all the prisoners got together and rebelled?"

The city of Dachau ran a shuttle in to the Altstadt, I think to help people overcome the one image they typically have of their city. It was a second Dachau entirely. It's actually quite pretty, away from the camp, with a beautiful small palace (their photo, right) on the highest hill, looking out over the Munich countryside. We cooled off with ice cream in the castle cafe, and then headed back in to Munich to see the game between Saudi Arabia and Tunisia. More on that later!