(One wonders if news of the dismantling of Dachau, the last bastion of pure Aryanism, had reached the Fuehrer in his final hours.)ĭachau, then, was one of the most enduring institutions of Nazism, rising and falling with the Third Reich itself, as grotesque and brutal as the regime that conceived it. Sitting deep inside one of the Third Reich’s most fiercely-guarded regions, Dachau, however, was stormed only on April 29, 1945, just a day before Hitler killed himself. The Red Army freed Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, while infantry battalions of the US Third Army liberated Buchenwald on April 11. Commissioned on March 22, 1933, within two months of Hitler’s appointment as the Reich Chancellor, it was also the last among the big camps to be liberated. We occupied the time by watching a documentary film – KZ-Dachau – that traces the camp’s grisly history for the visitor.ĭachau was the first of the Nazi ‘concentration’ camps. There was nothing for us to do but wait out the freezing rain. There were some grunts of agreement.Įven as the bus dropped us off at the camp gate, the drizzle turned into sleet, driving us all inside the visitors’ rest area. ‘The right weather for Dachau, I guess!’, said a co-passenger, drily. 724 that ferries visitors from the Dachau train station to the camp, it had begun to drizzle. The sky had closed in on a sunny winter’s day. The journey from Munich’s Hauptbahnhof was a short one, but, by the time we were getting down from the train, the weather had changed dramatically.