So its been a long time since my last post about traveling so I figured I would discuss one of the most thought provoking and influential trips of this abroad experience.
My friends and I had decided on Munich as our destination instead of Berlin when traveling to Germany for two reasons. One being that it was highly recommended to us and two being that there was a famous concentration camp in close distance.
We saw all the main sights in Munich: The HB beer hall, The BMW museum/factory, King Ludwig’s Castle and took a bus tour around the entire city.
The purpose of this particular blog is to focus on Dachau which is the concentration camp outside of Munich. If you are uninformed about what happened during WWII, Hitler and Nazi Germany planned the “Final Solution” which they believed was the complete and total extermination of the Jewish people. This event is known in history as the Holocaust. What many people don’t realize is that although the incredible majority of people that were systematically killed were Jewish, many people of other backgrounds were murdered.
Dachau
Dachau was originally known for being a work camp, and therefore not only housed Jews but political opponents of Hitler, gypsies and others. I have been to many Holocaust museums in the United States. I have visited Yad Vashem in Israel (The Holocaust Museum in Israel). I have never been to a place where you can sense the pain and torture throughout all the acres of the area. As the war went on Dachau quickly became a death camp in order to expedite the systematic killing of all these people. They were put into gas chambers and gassed to death by the hundreds.
The abuse of the Jewish people is so intensely absurd that it is difficult to believe that this could have occurred less than 70 years ago. What is more difficult to grasp is that the people living in the town of Dachau were footsteps away from this slaughter and had the naivety to not be concerned about the smell of dead bodies being burned in the furnaces.
Gas Chambers
Walking around the camp you get a sense of the feeling but can never imagine what the people that were prisoners there must have felt like. It is an incredible experience in the sense of seeing the atrocities that one man can commit against another especially in modern times. I apologize for the intensity of this particular blog but I urge anyone who reads this to visit this or any other Holocaust camps.
Munich all in all was incredible. The beer was great, our hotel room was awesome (we stayed at the holiday inn munich which was very reasonable, clean and modern), and the food was really good. We wanted to rent cars and drive on the autobahn but you need to be at least 25 so if you are, enjoy…..
Ebrod's Blog 