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Arbeit Macht Frei

It began on 22 March 1933. The place was Dachau, approximately 10 miles north-west of Munich. By the time Dachau camp was liberated at the end of the Second World War 31,591 people had been murdered within its grotesque precincts. This ineffable wickedness would leave its mark on the enlightened world in an utterly irrevocable way. We may have liberated the extermination camps, but who will liberate us?

The previously benign town of Dachau (Bavaria) was first mentioned in AD805 during the reign of Charlemagne, and was granted a market place during the middle of the thirteenth century. It would no doubt have remained anonymous were it not for the Nazi's. The konzentrationslager was established within the old munitions factory at Dachau, originally for the incarceration of political prisoners, but quickly became the prototype for other concentration and extermination camps that appeared across Europe. The Commandant, Obergruppenfuhrer Theodore Eicke, was born October 17, 1892 in Hamport, the son of a station master. Despite winning the Iron Cross during WW1 it would appear that Eicke was something of a nonconformist with a grievance against the Weimar and a history of political activism. Having joined the Nazi party in 1928 he had moved to the infamous SS by 1930, achieving the rank of Standartenfuhrer (Colonel) by 1931.
Eicke was involved in violent political activism in Bavaria for which he would have been incarcerated had he not fled to Italy, only returning in 1933 when Adolf Hitler came to power. It is not surprising to note that Eicke was also a resident of a mental asylum prior to his becoming Kommandant of Dachau in 1933, an appointment instructed by no less than Reichsfhrer-SS Heinrich Luitpold Himmler.
One could never elucidate the appalling and often stupefying facts associated with the Holocaust, nor explicate the raison d'tre for such appalling crimes, and so the figure of 6,000,000 murdered often echoes as an empty statistic. 200,000 prisoners passed through Dachau's gates and those who survived would be forced to endure their ordeal for many years.
On 20 May 1940, Auschwitz camp 1 was established in southern Poland and remained the largest of the concentration/extermination camps. Over the next two years the camp quickly expanded with Auschwitz 2 (Birkenau) in October 1941 and Auschwitz 3 in May 1942. Although the administrative centre (1) and satellite camps (3) were responsible for many murders it was the dreaded Birkenau, the extermination

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