Alongside the former extermination camps in what is now Poland (Sobibor, Treblinka, Blezec, Kulmhof, Majdanek, Auschwitz), hardly any other site within the Nazi camp system symbolises the crimes against humanity committed against the population of Europe like the first Nazi concentration camp, which was set up in the small Bavarian town of Dachau just a few weeks after the Nazis seized power.
In 2023, ninety years after its construction, the cynical nature of the camp complex still shines through to our present day, in which it finds its sad equivalent in camps such as Omarska, Lora, Trnopolje, the concentration camps of North Korea, or the so-called ‘re-education camps’ of Xinjiang. Initially intended as a camp for political prisoners, the Dachau concentration camp and its 169 satellite camps developed over twelve years into a ‘state within a state’ created by the SS, in which prisoners from over 40 countries were subject to special ‘laws’. The memorial located at the former camp complex counts up to 200,000 dead. Although the Dachau concentration camp is not cited as an extermination camp in official historiography, it should be emphasised that the principle of ‘extermination through labour’ was applied in the camp throughout its existence. In the Dachau trials held after the defeat of Nazi Germany, 1,672 people were accused (including those who had committed crimes in other concentration camps such as Mauthausen, Flossenbürg, Dora-Mittelbau, and Buchenwald), two thirds of whom were released from prison by the end of the 1950s.
Statements such as Marko Martin’s, ‘There is no blood in German streets because the German Jews were murdered in parts of Eastern Europe, and they went up in smoke’ go noddingly and unchallengedly acknowledged on German public television. This is in part because the role of camp complexes such as Dachau in the extermination of European Jews is hardly mentioned in public debates on the culture of remembrance. Nevertheless, researchers are unanimous in this regard: especially after 9 November 1938, the Dachau concentration camp served as a collection camp for Jews from Germany who were then transported from there to the extermination camps in the East – if they did not perish in the Dachau concentration camp beforehand. A plaque on the grounds of the Dachau memorial site reads in Yiddish: Kejnmol mer – Never again.
