Dachau Memorial Site - transfer by car

Minimum age 13 years!

 

This is what we offer

• Pickup: we will pick you up from your hotel / residential address

• Participants: Maximum 6 guests

• Guide: As certified guides, we are also your guide at the Dachau Memorial

• Return transfer: we take you back to your address at the end of the tour

 

Dachau – the former concentration camp

 

World War I ammunition factory, 12 years of concentration camp, 3 years of American special prison, 17 years of refugee camp and over 50 years of memorial: Dachau – a place of the darkest German history. Place of crime, cemetery, memorial and place of remembrance. On a 2.5 to 3-hour tour, the maybe most important question will be clarified:

 

How was this possible?

 

On January 30, 1933, Adolf Hitler was appointed Reich Chancellor of a Weimar Republic that was still functioning democratically in rudimentary form by Reich President Otto von Hindenburg. And just 51 days later, what is now known as the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial was opened as one of the very first concentration camps near the town of Dachau. How was this possible, what had happened? What was the “legal handle” to justify such camps?

For a long time, the governments of the Weimar Republic could only govern with the so-called “emergency decrees of the Reich President”. The most far-reaching one was the “Decree of the Reich President for the Protection of the People and the State”, which was issued as late as the night of February 27-28, 1933, after the fire at the Berlin Reichstag. It not only largely suspended the fundamental rights guaranteed in the constitution of the Weimar Republic, but also allowed the Reich government to intervene in the governmental sovereignty of the states. This decree paved the way from the democratically oriented Weimar Constitution to the National Socialist dictatorship and, in contrary to the actual declaration, instead of “until further notice,” actually remained in force until the collapse of the “Third Reich” in 1945.

 

Prior to these political events, Dachau was opened on March 22, 1933 and the inhumane machinery was underway.

Although Dachau was never an extermination camp, during the twelve years here, more than 41,000 of the 206,000 prisoners died of exhaustion or starvation, by execution or murder, by disease or human experiment.

 

The Dachau Memorial Site today

 

1965 – in particular at the insistence of the survivors – the first memorial on the site of the former concentration camp was opened. Today, hardly any former prisoners from Dachau are still alive, since the year 2003 the motto and the leitmotif for the visitor in Dachau was changed and this place was transformed into a place of learning and remembrance. The visitor is supposed to follow the “Path of the prisoner” and is invited to enter the grounds of the former “protective custody camp” through the original entrance with the gate bearing the inscription “Arbeit macht frei”.

Since 2003, the “Stiftung Bayerische Gedenkstätten” has taken over the Dachau and Flossenbürg concentration camp memorials. The foundation’s goal is to:

“To preserve and design the memorials as witnesses to the crimes of National Socialism, as places of remembrance of the suffering of the victims and as places of learning for future generations, to support the historical research related to them and to contribute to keeping the knowledge of historical events alive in people’s minds”. (Art. 2, para. 1. Memorial Foundation Act)