Dachau, << DAH kow, >> was the first permanent concentration camp set up in Germany by the Nazi government. It became the model for all other Nazi concentration camps. The facility stood at the edge of the town of Dachau, near Munich, in southeastern Germany. Opened on March 22, 1933, Dachau originally held political opponents of the Nazi regime. Before long, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma (Gypsies), gay people, and criminals were also interned in the camp. At first, Dachau held relatively few Jews.
Using prisoner labor, the Nazis expanded the camp in 1937 and 1938, and the number of Jewish prisoners steadily increased. The Schutzstaffel (protective squadron), or SS, used Dachau as a training center for its troops. The SS was a special military group responsible for, among other things, Nazi concentration camps. German doctors performed cruel medical experiments on many prisoners at Dachau, and the SS used thousands of other prisoners as forced laborers in and around the camp. The SS built crematoriums (furnaces for burning human remains) to handle the high volume of deaths within the camp.
As the Allies closed in on Germany during World War II (1939-1945), the Nazis took prisoners away from the front lines to camps deeper within Germany. Dachau became severely overcrowded, and a typhus epidemic swept through the camp. At least 28,000 prisoners were murdered or died of starvation and disease. United States forces found about 10,000 dead bodies and more than 32,000 starving prisoners when they liberated the camp on April 29, 1945. A memorial site on the grounds of the former concentration camp opened in 1965. See Concentration camp; Holocaust; Nazism.
