KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau

Cemetery description

The Dachau Concentration Camp in Bavaria was established by order of Heinrich Himmler on 22 March 1933. This was one of the first German concentration camps created.
According to the SS classification of concentration camps, the Dachau camp belonged to one of the most lenient categories, i.e. Stufe I. The camps from this category were meant for prisoners who were charged with minor offences and, as such, stood a chance of self-improvement. It was also meant for elderly people who were regarded as conditionally suitable for work. Until the outbreak of World War II, Dachau had been a place of imprisonment mainly for German anti-fascists, communists, Social Democrats, Jews, clergymen and, later, criminals and other ‘anti-social elements’.
As of mid-1942, the Dachau SS doctors commenced cruel experiments on the camp’s prisoners in order to research into the human body’s resistance to low air pressures and the reaction of the body to the lowering of its temperature. They also studied the possibilities of the utilisation of seawater as drinking water as well as the effects of diseases such as malaria and phlegmon. While carrying out their research, they pricked prisoners’ livers, performed unnecessary operations and tested new chemical substances on them. The conducted experiments were commissioned by chemical-pharmaceutical concerns and the German armed forces.
The Dachau concentration camp had at least 30 branches and the prisoners were employed in approximately 200 external kommandos (working units) in the Third Reich. They were employed in industrial plants such as BMW, IG-Farbenindustrie AG, Messerschmitt AG or had to conduct earthworks or building works. In short, the Dachau camp’s prisoners were employed almost in every branch of the German economy.
At the end of the war, the camp’s commandants evacuated the prisoners in the so-called ‘death marches’. The Dachau concentration camp was liberated by the American troops from the VIIth Army on 29 April 1945.
The exact number of prisoners and victims of the Dachau concentration camp remains unknown. According to the camp’s documentation, between 1933 and 1945, 200,000 prisoners from all over Europe passed through the camp, 31,000 of whom died. Other types of data suggest that 250,000 prisoners went through the camp and as many as 148,000 victims died (including those murdered in Dachau’s sub-camps). The number of prisoners who came from Poland is estimated at around 40,000, 8,000 of whom died in the camp. As for Polish Jews, the estimated number of the dead is 22,000. Thanks to the publication entitled ‘The list of the murdered Poles in the concentration camp of Dachau. Dachau 1946,’ authored by the former Dachau prisoner, Edmund Chart, which was created just after the camp’s liberation in a camp for ‘DPs’ (Displaced Persons) and on the basis of the camp’s preserved original documents, it was possible to recover 7,076 former prisoners’ names.
The Dachau concentration camp served as the main camp for clergymen. According to the Catholic Church’s estimates, 2,794 clergymen from 20 countries passed through the camp, including 1,780 Poles. Of these, 1,034 died, including 868 Poles.
The victims’ ashes (approx. 26,000) are buried in the graves that can be found in the crematorium area (built in 1943). The ashes of the remaining prisoners rest in the local cemeteries such as Waldfriedhof and Leitenberg in Dachau, and Perlacher Forst in Munich.
Since 1960, places of worship of different religious denominations have been built in the area of the former camp: the Catholic Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel (1960), the Jewish Memorial (1967), the Evangelical Church of Reconciliation (1967), the Convent of Carmelite Sisters of the Precious Blood (1964), and the Chapel in Memory of the Russian Orthodox Church (1995).
The Catholic Mortal Agony of Christ Chapel is a memorial site devoted to the Polish clergymen. Its wall bears the following inscription: ‘Here in Dachau every third victim was a Pole, one of every two Polish priests was martyred; their holy memory is venerated by their fellow-prisoners of the Polish clergy.’ In 1984, the camp was placed on the UNESCO list of the world’s heritage sites.
On 1 January 2003, the Bavarian Memorial Foundation took responsibility for the care of the site. The Foundation answers to the Bavarian State Ministry for Education and Culture, Science and Art and is funded with the resources from the State’s budget, the city of Munich and the federal donation programme.

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