The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site preserves the location of a camp established on March 22, 1933, only weeks after Adolf Hitler became German chancellor. The Nazi authorities initially held political prisoners there. Dachau later served as a model for other concentration camps and a training ground for SS personnel. Over the camp’s twelve years, more than 200,000 people from across Europe were imprisoned in Dachau and its many subcamps; the memorial gives 41,500 as the number murdered. US troops liberated the survivors on April 29, 1945. These figures belong to the memorial’s historical account and should be read as evidence of persecution, not as a measure of individual lives.
The name “Dachau” became attached to a system far larger than the surviving main camp. The camp network expanded across southern Germany as the war progressed, while prisoners were subjected to forced labor, violence, hunger and disease. The memorial’s interpretation helps visitors understand how a place first presented as a prison for political opponents developed into an instrument of terror. Approaching the site with that chronology in mind is important: the buildings and grounds are not a theatrical reconstruction, but a historical place associated with real victims, survivors, perpetrators and families.
