Dachau Concentration Camp: A tour to remember

20 Minutes away from Munich you will arrive at the Dachau Concentration Camp. Today this place is a memorial, a museum that narrates the horrors that thousands of people lived inside its walls. It opened its doors several years before World War II. The main purpose of Dachau was to serve as a place of detention for political prisoners of the time. However, as the war went on and the “Final Solution” started to happen, it became an extermination camp, the first one of the first of the many that Heinrich Himmler would establish to exterminate the Jewish population in Europe.

Here was also the place where the SS, started to take shape, and Dachau is widely known as the “School of violence” of the SS.

During the 60s, a group of survivors founded the Museum on-site as a way to honor the memories of those who perished during the times of the holocaust. The Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Tour is a tourist attraction that you should not miss during your visit to Munich.

Dachau: from a detention center to an extermination site.

It was inaugurated in 1933 to be a place to incarcerate political prisoners. But it quickly became the first stepping-stone to the holocaust and the so-called Final Solution. The camp had a legend on the entrance that stated: Arbeit Macht Frei or: Work will set you free, which is a bog irony, considering the fate of a considerable amount of its inhabitants during the years it remained operative. During World War II, it became a prison camp, and later an extermination camp designed to kill all Jews from Europe.

The camp was liberated by allied forces on April 29, 1945. Together with Auschwitz are the most known and visited concentration camps.

Dachau: From Extermination Camp to Memorial Museum.

Today, Dachau serves as a museum. 1965, surviving prisoners founded the Dachau Committee and with the help of the Bavarian state, they converted the site into a museum to serve as a memorial of everything that happened there.

With 22 areas, visitors are allowed to view 21 of them. The SS training grounds are not open to the public. The tour that happens within the camp aims to put you in the daily life that inmates of Dachau experienced during World War II. During the tour, you will be visiting key areas of the camp, like the Bunker, where many horrible experiments were performed on inmates. After walking a bit more, you will arrive at the Leitenberg Mass Graves, a place where more than 7000 people found their final rest… as there was not enough coal to burn their corpses.

Dachau Concentration Memorial Tour

If you happen to be visiting Munich, a guided tour to Dachau is one of the best experiences you can live if you like history and want to see what happened inside the walls of a concentration camp. A visit to a place like this will tell you in just 5 hours the perseverance stories of thousands of people, how they battled against an uncertain destiny. You will never forget that even though the darkest of times, the light should prevail.

If you want to have the best experience of Dachau, there’s no better way to do it than accompanied by our amazing guides. They have been trained in stories and facts, have extensive knowledge of the historical background surrounding the camp, and are open to questions. They will also handle every topic with dignity and sensitivity, honoring the memory of the victims.

So, give Radius Tour a call, and be ready to live a life-changing experience.