Dachau Town

Dachau was a working-class town and, during the Munich Soviet Republic, a stronghold of the SPD, USPD and KPD. When Rudolf Hess wanted to advertise for the Nazi Party in the “Hörhammer” inn, he was expelled with jeers, whistles and the Internationale. In the Reichstag elections in March 1933, the Nazis got only 23.9 percent in Dachau and 43.1 percent in Bavaria. It was proud to be a red city. Nevertheless, Dachau achieved inglorious fame through the Dachau concentration camp set up by the Nazis in 1933, the first “official” camp that, along with Auschwitz, became the epitome of concentration camps in Germany. Himmler had it built to the east of the city of Dachau on the site of the former Dachau Royal Powder and Munitions Factory in 1933. The factory had been falling into disrepair since 1920. The fully developed and hermetically sealed site belonged to the state and was known to Heinrich Himmler beforehand - which is probably why this location was chosen for the first camp. The Dachau municipal council was not informed. Dachau itself was by no means a stronghold of the völkischmovement, the Nazis, in contrast to the KPD, had not benefited from unemployment. The concentration camp served - especially in its early years, when the Nazis wanted to consolidate its power - to imprison and deter political dissidents. As early as March 22, around 150 prisoners from the prisons in Landsberg am Lech, Neudeck and Stadelheim were brought to the site. 

On November 15, 1933, the former market town of Dachau was elevated to the status of a town. Since April 1, 1939, the Dachau concentration camp has belonged to the city of Dachau. The concentration camp was a training centre for the ϟϟ concentration camp guards and is now a memorial. During the war, thousands of Soviet prisoners of war were shot at the shooting range near Hebertshausen between October 1941 and April 1942 by ϟϟ teams on the basis of the "commissar order". In 1945, those former prisoners of the Dachau concentration camp who had died as a result of incarceration in the months immediately after the liberation of the camp were buried in the forest cemetery in the Etzenhausen district. In addition, here is the final resting place of Jewish prisoners who died on the death march from the Flossenbürg concentration camp to Dachau at the end of April 1945. Another memorial site since 1959 is the Leitenberg Cemetery of Honour. From May 1944, an air raid shelter with numerous tunnels and shelters was built under the Dachau Schlossberg. Shortly before the end of the war, on April 28, 1945, the Dachau Uprising took place. A resistance group led by Georg Scherer and Walter Neff, consisting of concentration camp prisoners who had just escaped, Dachau citizens and members of the Volkssturm, wanted to end the Nazi regime in the city and prevent a senseless defensive struggle.

The station immediately during liberation, with clothes scattered all over, and today. Prisoners who arrived at the train station would march down this street to the concentration camp. The railway station served as a “collecting point” for prisoner transports. Dachau’s residents could see how prisoners and, frequently, dead bodies were unloaded from the trains, and how the ϟϟ marched the prisoners to the camp in broad daylight. Moreover, Dachau residents saw the haggard prisoners who, from 1941 onwards, came to town under ϟϟ guard to perform forced labour for local businesses. 

A sidetrack led from Dachau railway station to the ϟϟ camp. The ϟϟ sometimes transported prisoners to the site of their imprisonment in goods trains. The newly arrived prisoners passed through the western entrance of the ϟϟ camp and on to the barracks area. The sidetrack was removed in 1948. At the former entrance to the ϟϟ grounds, where today the Isar-Amperwerke Straße runs, a small section of the line has survived. Two days before the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29 1945, a prisoner transport from the Buchenwald concentration camp arrived. Loaded with 4,480 prisoners, the train had been on route for 21 days. The ϟϟ had crammed the prisoners in goods wagons and given them practically nothing to eat or drink. During the journey, thousands died of hunger and exhaustion or were shot by the ϟϟ. A train full of dying and already dead persons arrived in Dachau. Only 816 persons survived the transport. The ϟϟ refused the train entry into the ϟϟ camp, so that it remained standing on the track in front of the gates. Upon reaching the Dachau concentration camp, American soldiers found the bodies in the wagons, a discovery that traumatised many of them.
In front of the railway station is Frühlingstrasse, which was renamed Adolf-Hitler-Strasse on March 24, 1933. The documents on the right made this official after the Dachau town council voted unanimously whilst Lord Mayor Georg Seufert of the Catholic Bavarian People's Party declared Hitler an honorary citizen. Soon after on November 15, 1933, the former market town of Dachau was elevated to town status. Hitler himself expressed his thanks:

The honorary citizenship bestowed upon me by the town council gives me great pleasure. I accept the honorary citizenship and would like to express to the town council my most sincere thanks and my sincere best wishes for the well-being of Dachau.

It was down this road that prisoners were marched to the camp. After the war the street's name reverted back to the original.

Originally the Café Alt-Dachau at Frühlingstraße 4, given its involvement in the establishment of the Nazi Party in Dachau it was renamed the Brown Front in 1933. After all the nationalist paramilitary groups that had participated in the Beer Hall Putsch of November 8 and 9, 1923, in Munich were prohibited, the Dachau members of the Bund Oberland (Oberland League) used this restaurant as their meeting place, and it was the first in Dachau which permitted them to enter They met secretly under the name Stammtisch Edelweiss (Edelweiss Club), and the edelweiss on both sides of their collars was the sign of the Freikorps Oberland (Oberland Free Corps).

It was in this restaurant that Dachau's first local Nazi Party group was to be founded by around ten former Oberland members. They met in the café to Set up their own party group, but they were tricked by a conman who claimed to have been sent by the Munich Nazi Party leadership. After a short speech the conman collected the entrance fees for party membership, whereupon he disappeared with the money and was never seen in Dachau again. The local Nazi Party was founded some time later, and when internal disputes led to a call for new leadership in 1932, Eberhard Beeskow took over as local leader at a crisis meeting held in this restaurant and attended by several party members. On April 26, 1933, the Dachau League of German Girls held its founding meeting here.

Down Frühlingstrasse to Schleissheimer Strasse under underpass below the rail line leads to the left into Friedenstrasse. This was the same route taken by prisoners marching to the concentration camp. The local town council chose the name Friedenstrasse on October 25, 1919 for the first residential street set up after the First World War, hence its name- 'Freedom Street'. Here it is shown in April 1945 and today with student, showing Dachau residents forced to haul the enormous number of corpses up to Leitenberg mass grave. The name was originally written as two words (Frieden-Strasse), and it was considered by the town council at the time to be "one of Dachau's longest and most beautiful streets" according to the Dachauer Volksblatt. 

Along Friedenstrasse to Fritz-Müller-Weg on the left is a foot and cycle path that leads to this footbridge that follows the route of the former rail siding that linked Dachau station to the ϟϟ camp. On the left by the footbridge a small stretch of the track can be still be seen today, where it curves right in front of the bridge over the driveway leading to the Dachau Volunteer Fire Department.) The prisoners were marched from the station to the concentration camp along Schleissheimer Strasse and Friedenstrasse, and then they followed this road beside the rail track which led directly to the camp. They were only transported by rail cars via this industrial rail line in exceptional cases. The track had been built on a weak foundation, and was difficult to maintain. Prisoners had to carry out repeated repairs. The siding was built by Bavaria's military authorities in 1915 for the use of the Dachau Royal Gunpowder and Munitions Factory. Above is the scene as the Americans found it in April 1945 and how it appears today.

The town hall's topping out ceremony in 1934. The town hall was first mentioned on April 9, 1486, and was rebuilt in 1614-15 shortly before the outbreak of the Thirty Years' War, but three hundred years later it was so dilapidated that it could no longer be preserved. The town hall was closed to the public because it was in danger of collapsing, and surveyors decided in April 1934 that it should be demolished. The town's administration was transferred to the first story of the Ziegler villa in Freisinger Strasse 2 (today Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse 3), which the town had already bought from Eduard Ziegler in 1933. On April 29-30, 1934, the Amper-Bote reported that "the town treasury has already moved to new premises in the old savings bank on Schrannen square, and the Kreisleitung of the NSDAP is also moving into temporary new quarters." The new building was designed by the Munich architect Georg Buchner with Baroque gables in keeping with the original.' On March 12, 1936, the first public mayoral conference took place "in the now fully completed, spacious and attractive conference hall of the town hall" (Dachauer Volksblatt). At that meeting Lambert Friedrichs, the mayor and Kreisleiter of the Nazi Party at the time, stated that "the town of Dachau can look ahead confidently to the future." The Dachauer Volksblatt reported on March 14, 1936: "Now that it has two ϟϟ camps, Dachau has become a garrison town and this has led to a perceptible upswing for Dachau's trade, business and commerce." The "two camps" were the concentration camp and the ϟϟ training camp. However, a substantial upturn in the economy of the impoverished town did not materialise.

The rathaus in 1936 and today. In the passageway through the new town hall on the right are these two plaques that commemorate the Jews of Dachau who died in the Holocaust. The plaque on top refers to Reichskristallnacht. The one below it lists the names of five of the twelve Jews of Dachau who would die in the death camps: Julius Kohn, Max Wallach, Melly Wallach, Hans Neumeyer, and Vera Neumeyer.

 On April 28, 1945, the town hall was the scene of the Dachau Uprising. Its aim was to topple the Nazi regime in Dachau by occupying the town hall and the Landratsamt (county administration office) nearby. In the last months of the war the office of the mayor also had an external work unit from Dachau concentration camp, although it consisted of only one prisoner. The rapid growth of the town after the First World War made it necessary to build a new and larger town hall.

On the left is the Hörhammerbräu Inn where, in November 1922, the Bund Oberland was established which would later become the Dachau Nazi party in 1929 and where it would hold regular meetings; one speaker had been Rudolf Hess who was prevented from speaking by communists in February 1933. Because the KPD did as well, violent fights would break out. Indeed, in the years preceding the Nazis' seizure of power this inn was repeatedly the scene of embittered conflicts between Dachau Communists and members of the Nazi Party, although aparently they never came to blows. The local Dachau branch of the KPD organised mass meetings with leading Bavarian party speakers such as one occasion on October 19, 1932 when Leonhard Hausmann, the party secretary from Augsburg spoke. He was later murdered by the ϟϟ in Dachau concentration camp on May 17, 1933. The Eiserne Front was also active against the Nazi rise in Dachau. As late as March 2, 1933, the Iron Front announced a meeting in the Dachauer Volksblatt, to be held in the hall of the Horhammerbräu inn the next day and called on Volksgenossen to attend. In view of the Reichstag elections to be held on March 5, a speaker of the Iron Front spoke of the decisive struggle for "freedom, work and bread." Up until November 1933 the Hörhammerbrau Inn was one of four polling stations in Dachau; on March 13, 1932, in the first round of the elections for the president of the Reichstag, 872 Dachau residents voted at the Hörhammerbräu inn for Hindenburg and only 143 voted for Hitler. On April 10, in the second round, 1,137 votes were cast here and only twenty votes were for Hitler.

In the autumn of 1937 the inn was forced to shut down by the Nazis after the owner complained about the behaviour of an ϟϟ man. He also had to pay a fine of 500 Reichsmarks and make a public apology on October 29 in the Dachauer Volksblatt: "I take back the offensive remarks I made about the ϟϟ and the Party and greatly regret having made them. Josef Schmid.

During the war the Nazi Party Kreisleiter convened a meeting in this inn at which he issued a stern admonition to all the women living on Freisinger Strasse (now the Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse) for aiding prisoners after having arranged food for a work unit from Dachau concentration camp in the winter of 1943-44, although this had been expressly forbidden by the ϟϟ.

 On the right is the Obere Apotheke, which had been damaged in the fighting on April 30, 1919 between the Freikorps Görlitz, sent by the government from Berlin, and the Red Army which had occupied Dachau since winning the so-called "Battle of Dachau" a fortnight earlier. The Freikorps was also known as the White Guard because they wore white armbands while the Red Army wore red armbands. After a battle that lasted one day, the Freikorps liberated the town of Dachau from the Communists. The white armbands, worn by the Freikorps, were decorated with an ancient emblem called the swastika. 

 During the war the chemist's supplied the medicine to the prisoners at the camp, delivered by way of the parish office of St. Jakob and even provided medication illegally to prisoners working in the town on work details. After his release from the concentration camp the former prisoner Heinrich Rupieper, a Catholic priest, thanked the Lernbecher family in a personal letter for the medical aid they had provided. On September 1, 1945, Rupieper was temporarily appointed district superintendent of schools and entrusted with the task of rebuilding the school system in Dachau.

Heldengedenktag commemoration conducted by the Nazis next to St. Jakob church at Schrannenplatz; today a large tree has all but obscured the war memorial behind it which was designed by Karl Kroher and dedicated in 1929. It shows the martyrdom of St. Sebastian and reads: "To protect Dachau and you, the heroes went to battle. We offer them our thanksgiving. So great was their sacrifice." 

In 1930 Friedrich Pflanzelt became parish priest at St. Jakob's. When the concentration camp was opened in March 1933, he volunteered to say Mass for the prisoners in one of the barracks despite it not belonging to his parish at that time, seeing it as his duty to carry out pastoral work with the prisoners. Indeed, that Easter Monday Hilmar Wackerle, the camp commandant, allowed him to celebrate mass leaving Pflanzelt to write enthusiastically to the bishopric in Munich on April 9, 1933 how "[t]he SA and ϟϟ guards quickly responded to my invitation and came to the parish church on Palm Sunday. They came to the church in good soldierly manner and made an excellent impression on the other church-goers with their firm discipline and exemplary conduct." After Wackerle's replacement as commandant of the camp, his successor Theodor Elcke initially indicated that he was amenable to Pflanzelt's applications to hold mass and confession at the prison camp. However, the climate began to change and Pflanzelt's activities were increasingly restricted. He continued to say Mass and hear confessions at the camp until August 1936 by which time the number of prisoners attending Mass decreased considerably, fearing as they did the threats of beating and be forced to work on Sunday. At one point the ϟϟ even mocked Pflanzelt as soon as the approached the camp grounds by playing a popular song on the loudspeaker: "Du schwarzer Zigeuner komm spiel mir was vor" (Come, you black gypsy and play me a song). In the end the priest had to discontinue all visits to the concentration camp. On November 4, 1936, he wrote to Cardinal Michael von Faulhaber "although it is deeply regrettable and makes my heart bleed, that since late August no one has been coming to mass any more! I went to the camp every Sunday until October 15.... But after mass was announced I was always told: 'Sir, no one has reported.'" 

On the nights of March 29 and April 20, 1936, several windows of the rectory on Pfarrstrasse 7 were smashed. The suspect was an SA man who was angry at Pflanzelt's refusal to ring the church bells on the eve of the elections held on Sunday, March 29, at which Germans were called upon to declare their "unreserved devotion" to Hitler and his policies. 

Despite this Pflanzelt gave a statement to the Dachauer Volksblatt which was published on April 23, 1936, describing how "in the night from March 29 to 30, and again last night at half past two, miserable wretches deliberately smashed some of the windows of the rectory with brute force. These 'heroes' may be proud of their nightly pranks, but I have only ONE answer for them that I, as a priest and a German, will continue to do my duty without tire or worry! But I warn every nightly disturber of the peace that I wil give him something to think about if I ever catch him in Pfarrstrasse. I can accept no responsibility for what might happen to such a hooligan." In fact, Pflanzelt ended up applying to the Dachau district administration for a gun license even though in 1934 the Bavarian Secret Police instituted legal proceedings against Pflanzelt at the Munich Special Court for infringement of the Military Equipment Act due to two old rifles had been found in the rectory attic. The charges were later dropped. On February 25, 1937, the public prosecutor's office in Munich brought charges of "slander" instigated by the Gestapo on behalf of the camp commander Hermann Baranowski. These charges too were dropped the following year.

 Since Dachau is built on a hill, it has many underground passages including the one under the church. 

The Kochwirt restaurant before the First World War and today, sited directly across the street from the church (on the steps of which I took my photo). It had developed into a favourite meeting place of Dachau's factory workers who were attracted to its low prices, and generally avoided the more middle-class brewery inns. After the fall of the monarchy in Bavaria, members of the Dachau Social Democratic Association and the Dachau Free Trade Unions held a public meeting here on November 14, 1918, to formally found the Dachau Council of Workers, Citizens and Farmers. The first activities of this council on November 18 consisted of closely monitoring the work of the town administration and district authorities, combating profiteering, working towards a fairer distribution of food and the introduction of fixed prices, seeing to an economic use of the town's monies, and also promoting welfare work and housing construction. Five months later after the Red Guards took Dachau on April 16,1919, Ernst Toller- who served for six days as President of the short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic and would gain international renown as a writer after his subsequent imprisonment- spoke to Dachau's workers from the porch of the Kochwirt Restaurant.

The restaurant was badly damaged on New Year's Eve, 1940, when ϟϟ men, picking for a fight, attacked members of the Dachau traditional alpine costume association "D'Schlossbergler". In the ensuing brawl windows and glasses were smashed. That same night ϟϟ soldiers also attacked the guests in Café Belstler, a popular dance hall, wine and weissbier bar, as well as patrons in the Zieglerbräu Inn.

The Stadtkeller shown on the left has had its name since July 1936 when SA man Paul Taut, serving on the town council, leased the building to open a restaurant. Up to then it had been owned by the Dachau Association of Free Trade Unions where the Social Democrats held their party meetings and as a result it became the centre for the trade unions. When the Nazis won the March 5, 1933 elections, union leaders met here to plan their defence against the coming attack by SA men from Augsburg. The attack, however, did not take place. On March 9, the union building again became the focus of attention when the police admonished the SA and ϟϟ to be level-headed whilst taking control of Dachau, advising them against seizing the union building so as to avoid a bloody clash with the workers. The Recreation Centre was taken over by the Nazi-controlled German Labour Front (DAF), which was founded in November 1933. It provisionally set up its Dachau office here where previously meetings of the Dachau Social Democrats had been held, thus now losing its traditional meeting place. At a compulsory auction held by the Nazis in June 1935, the town council offered 30,000 Reichsmarks for the site, which was heavily encumbered with mortgages. The restaurant was eventually leased from the town council by Paul Taut, a councilor and SA-Sturmführer, and his wife, who ran it as of July 1, 1936. Taut was commander of the SA-Sturmbann III/1 in Dachau and, as a butcher, had previously worked at the local Wülfert meat-processing factory.

The Brückenwirt Inn, site of a particular tragedy during the Nazi era. Its innkeeper and butcher, Ludwig Rosner, was arrested after making anti-Nazi remarks here and sent to the camp. During the time he was incarcerated his wife had suffered an emotional breakdown and had taken their two sons (aged about six and seven) where they were last seen in a shop in Eschenried where she bought them candy.

She was last seen in Eschenried where she bought candy for her children in a little shop. Then all trace of the three was lost. They were still missing when Rosner returned home from the camp.They remained missing when Rosner had been released months later after raspberry-pickers came across the bodies of the three amongst the bushes in Zieglerwald, where the ASV stadium stands today. Mrs. Rosner had committed suicide there with her sons, using the captive-bolt pistol from her husband's butcher's shop. Past the inn, one arrives at the Mühlbachweg, which was the path women from Dachau used when they accompanied escaped prisoners from the concentration camp during the Dachau Uprising on April 28, 1945.

Further along the street after the Brückenwirt Inn, the New Gallery was once the site of the Dachau Labour Service Camp shown in 1937 and today. In 1935 those between the ages of 18 to 25 as well as the unemployed were made to volunteer for one year of labour service. By the end of the war teenagers and those over the age of sixty were called up into the Volkssturm and this was its base. 
On the morning of April 28, 1945 an armed revolt broke out in Dachau in which, a resistance group led by Georg Scherer and Walter Neff, consisting of recently escaped concentration camp prisoners, Dachau citizens and members of the Volkssturm, actively sought to end the Nazi regime in the city and prevent a senseless defence. At around 8.30 they occupied the Town Hall but, due to the superior forces of the deployed ϟϟ units, it was bloodily suppressed in a few hours. Nevertheless, the revolt not only contributed to saving the town of Dachau from destruction by the Allies, but also to ending the evacuation transports from the concentration camp.

The Unterbräu Inn in 1934 and today. It is apparently the oldest brewery in Dachau. On April 16, 1919 this was the headquarters of the Red Army when it controlled Dachau before being overthrown over a week later by Freikorps Görlit. It holds a place in Nazi mythology as the site where the Dachau NSDAP Ortsgruppe was officially founded on February 1, 1930 under the chairmanship of NSDAP Gauleiter for Upper Bavaria, Fritz Reinhardt who, on April 1, 1933 was appointed State Secretary in the Reich Ministry of Finance. In fact, it was to this man that “Aktion Reinhardt” was named whereby the Jews of the Polish General Government became the first large group of Jews to be liquidated by gas in 1942–43. Fritz Reinhardt had by then become the official in the Finance Ministry responsible for administering the valuables, including dental gold, taken from the victims before or after their deaths.

However, a more infamous event took place here on Sunday, July 17 1932- the so-called Battle of Unterbräu Inn where seven SA men had fled after having antagonised members of the Reichsbanner by stealing a flag from the Jungsozialisten. They were protected by the innkeeper who stood in the doorway with two dogs until they were saved by a Bavarian state police riot squad.

  Dachau's old cemetery dates back to 1571 when the municipal authorities decided to establish a new cemetery north of the moat, since the older cemetery surrounding St. Jakob had become too small. Up until the middle of the nineteenth century, it was customary in Dachau to distinguish between the Friethof (churchyard) surrounding St. Jakob's, which existed until 1833, and the burial ground called Gottesacker ("God's own acre") outside the town's ramparts in the churchyard of the Chapel of the Holy Cross, which was built in 1627-28 and ascribed to Hans Krumpper. This chapel, consecrated in 1961, is now Dachau's war memorial and commemorates those killed in action in both World Wars.

 This cemetery has a number of "old, bourgeois family graves, some dating back to the eighteenth century" (Dreher), and is also the final resting place of Georg Scherer, former Dachau concentration camp prisoner and later mayor of Dachau. (To find his simple grave go right at the entrance of the Gottesacker burial grounds and follow the cemetery wall.)

Memorial to four members of the Freikorps Görlitz buried here, who were killed in fighting with the Red Army near Pellheim on April 30, 1919. In May 1919 the municipal authorities decided to pay the burial costs of the "members of the government troops who were killed while driving the Red Guards out of Dachau" and also to cover the costs of a gravestone and care of the grave site. The records of the 17th Dachau town council meeting on October 25, 1919, include the following assessment of the gravestone for the dead: "Prior to the meeting the members of the town council gathered in the cemetery to inspect the monument to the Freikorps Görlitz. It was noted that the monument is not at all as unsightly as the building committee had reported. The monument simply lacks an appropriate base, and this should now be provided." The commemorative plaque, dubbed the "Görlitz Memorial", was not completed until 1934. The Amper-Bote reported: "On Sunday, April 29, an old wish of the faithful friends of the Görlitz men will be granted - that there finally be a fitting gravestone for the four soldiers who died liberating Dachau. ... At the request of Mayor Seufert, Mr. Eduard Wittmann from Würmmühle donated the marble for the two steps up to the monument; two large stone blocks unearthed during the extension of the gymnasium in Brunngartenstrasse were lowered into the ground to serve as the foundation. The gravestone slab was donated by Mayor Seufert, who had bought it years before from the Hallmeyer tannery. The slab is unusually large and attractive and its transportation to the monument wall required the strength of 15 men. ... The monument was designed by Mayor Seufert, as were the garden surroundings. The base for the monument and the inscription were carved most skillfully by Lehner, the master stonemason, and his son."
The plaque now bore the inscription: "Deutschland, Deutschland, über alles / True to the Hymn of the German People / They died in the liberation of Dachau/on April 30, 1919, men of the Freikorps Görlitz / 2nd Lieutenant Bertram / Musketeer Labuke / Private Hauk / Gunner Hilbig." The first line was later erased and today the city distances itself from this memorial, the Freikorps is considered to be the bearer of right-wing extremist violence and a pioneer of National Socialism.

 The chapel shown right was dedicated to the town's war dead in 1961.

The municipal authorities also arranged and paid for the burial of the five members of the Red Army who were court-martialed and executed by soldiers of the Freikorps Görlitz on April 30, 1919. In May 1919 the bodies of Alois Schießl, Philipp Weigand and Josef Unsinn were exhumed and transferred to Munich, and the remains of Albert Kaul were taken to Bamberg. In 1933 the first victims of Dachau concentration camp were also buried at the cemetery. After suffering greatly, Franz Stenzer, the Communist Reichstag Deputy, was shot in Dachau concentration camp on August 22, 1933, allegedly whilst attempting to escape. The Amper-Bote reported on the funeral in its August 29 issue: "Thirty-two year old... Franz Stenzer from Pasing, who was shot and killed during a break-out attempt at Dachau concentration camp, found his final resting place at Dachau town cemetery. His quiet funeral last Saturday at 3 pm. was attended by his grieving wife with her three children, his elderly mother, and various relatives. Numerous friends and colleagues were also in attendance. ... May this fresh grave mound give cause to all those who sympathise with the views of the deceased to reflect upon and to change their ways!"

Parish priest Friedrich Pflanzelt with ϟϟ men at a funeral at the cemetery. In terms of his political convictions, Planzelt had belonged to the bourgeois nationalist camp of the Weimar period and, fearing communism, resulted in a sympathy for the Nazis although despite rumour that he had joined the Nazi Party, this has been debunked. In 1933 Pfanzelt became a prisoner pastor in the Dachau concentration camp, where he initiated courageous relief efforts, but was banned from the camp in 1936 because he is said to have listened to an ϟϟ man's confession in a manner which appeared to oppose the regime. At no time did the Americans consider destroying the town of Dachau or the concentration camp despite the legend that Pfanzelt had asked for the rescue of Dachau when he and Mayor Zauner kneeled on the floor in the American headquarters, which was quartered in his grandparents' house, and personally asked for the town to be spared. Presumably Pfanzelt himself spread this story by sending a letter to the Ordinariate after the end of the war stating that he had prevented the bombing of Dachau.

In the foreground in the photo of Augsburgerstraße at number 17 on the right is the Bäckerei Teufelhart which had supplied bread to the camp and to prisoners in the town on labour detail. This bistro continues the gastronomic tradition of the old Kraisy buildings, which housed an inn as early as 1618. Joseph Kraisy took over the property on April 19, 1832, and in 1851 erected the building still to be seen here today, which held the Zum Lamm Inn. In the last years of the war the premises of the "Kraisy", was used for the production of arms. Prisoners did forced labour here in the large hall of the inn.

Ludwig Thoma House at Augsburger Strasse 23, set slightly back from the street. It had been the venue for Dachau residents for decades and in 1917 the inn became the Catholic Community Centre, becoming the focal point for the activities of various Catholic associations in Dachau. Toward the end of the Weimar Republic the speeches of Dr. Emil Muhler, a Munich priest, caused some controversy here. Muhler had been a curate at the Dachau parish of St. Jakob from 1920 to 1924. On February 11, 1932, he was invited by the Catholic Journey. men's Association to speak at the Catholic Community Centre, and on February 24, 1933, he spoke there at an election rally of the Bavarian People's Party. On both occasions before a packed hall he insistently warned his listeners of the Nazis' true aims. Persecution and imprisonment were the price Muhler had to pay for his resistance to the Nazis. After the war a street in Dachau was named after him. In addition, Father Rupert Mayer, beatified by Pope John Paul II on May 3, 1987, was also twice a guest speaker at the Catholic Community Centre in 1933. This itinerant preacher and men's pastoral worker spoke here on the topic "We Catholics and Our Time". His public appearances were a particular thorn in the side of the Nazis; in 1936 the Jesuit was cautioned for the first time by the public prosecutor in Munich, and on April 7, 1937, the Gestapo in Berlin banned him from speaking anywhere in the Reich. When the steadfast priest disregarded the ban, he was detained for the first time on June 5, 1937, and on July 23, 1937, he was sentenced to six months in prison. However, because of the indignation of the cardinal and large parts of the Munich population, he was released. Before the special court he declared: "Despite the ban on me from speaking, I will continue to preach, even if the state authorities judge my pulpit speeches to be a criminal offence and pulpit abuse."As he continued to preach anti-regime, he was arrested again on January 5, 1938 and taken to the prison in Landsberg am Lech. He was released through an amnesty on May 3, 1938 and adhered to the ban on preaching, but refused to provide information about his pastoral talks. Therefore, on November 3, 1939, he was arrested for the third time and taken to Sachsenhausen concentration camp. After the war, he returned to Munich where, on the feast of All Saints' Day, he suffered a stroke during the sermon at morning mass in the Kreuzkapelle of Munich's St. Michaels Church. He received last rites and died 2 1/2  hours later. 

 Memorial in the town designed by Israeli Abraham Borenstein for the 50th anniversary of the camp's liberation in collaboration with the Dachau State Vocational School and Dachau artists. It is made up of original railway track near where the 45th Thunderbird division discovered the so-called "death train" within which the remains of 2,310 prisoners shipped from Buchenwald three weeks before were left and is located at John-F.-Kennedy-Platz near the concentration camp memorial.

The second memorial shown in the next two photographs is one designed by Hubertus von Pilgrim in the town itself, dedicated to the concentration camp inmates who where sent on so-called Todesmärsche (death marches) from Dachau in April 1945 southwards. this is one of 23 such memorials that are along the routes of the marches (apart from the last which is in Jerusalem).

After the war displaced persons were settled in Dachau, as in many other Bavarian communities, which led to a population increase of approximately thirty to 40%. After being temporarily accommodated in the barracks of the former concentration camp, the families were housed with the local population. Only the expansion through the new building areas in Dachau-Süd and the new settlement Dachau-Ost brought relaxation here. All in all, the population of the place grew very strongly during the so-called Wirtschaftswunder and there was a structural change from a rural, small-commercial place to a place of residence today with many commuters.

In the northern part of the Dachau's Waldfriedhof there is a terraced grave site that was laid out for 1,312 concentration camp victims. These were former Dachau prisoners who died in the months after their liberation on April 29, 1945 as a result of their concentration camp imprisonment.

Between 1955 and 1958, the Italian, French, Belgian and Dutch recovery services exhumed some of the victims buried in the forest cemetery and repatriated them back to their home countries. Victims of the "death marches" from abandoned Upper Bavarian concentration camp cemeteries were reburied in the freed graves having initially been buried in cemeteries along the way.

Some Polish nationals who worked for the American military government as guards in the Dachau internment camp are buried in the top row of graves. In the vicinity of the cemetery there are memorials in memory of the Jewish, Polish and Austrian Nazi victims as well as a memorial stone in memory of those who died in the “Dachau Uprising” on April 28, 1945 when an armed resistance group made up of escaped concentration camp prisoners and Dachau residents. Citizens stormed the town hall on that day in order to liberate the city from the Nazi regime before the arrival of the Allies. Waffen-SS units put down the uprising and killed six of the resistance fighters. The four-metre high monument shown in these photos overlooking both Jewish and non-Jewish graves, is dedicated to the Jewish prisoners killed on the death march from from the Flossenbürg camp as the war ended. The last photo shows a memorial specifically to Austrian victims.  Another plaque on the Dachau town hall square commemorates the victims of the “Dachau Uprising”. Several elongated raised mass graves lie parallel to one another. Rectangular stone slabs placed on top commemorate the deceased.

Rows of wooden crosses on the cemetery for concentration camp victims in the forest cemetery around 1945, with the nearby village seen in the background and the site today with the memorial to the right.

Before the war the District and Municipal Savings Bank of Dachau-Indersdorf established its main branch in this building, known as the Ziegler villa. In the second half of the eighteenth century it housed the court registry, and documents show that Sebastian Knorr, a regional court clerk, lived here in 1784. The property later fell into disrepair and was used as a barn, which a source mentions as being purchased by the farmer Franz X. Wieninger in 1827. Wieninger erected a new building here which passed by inheritance into the hands of the Ziegler family in 1856. In 1933 Eduard Ziegler sold the Ziegler villa to the town council. The offices of the town hall, which was in danger of collapsing, were then transferred to this building. After the Nazis took over power in Dachau on March 14, 1933, an ϟϟ and SA guardpost was set up as an auxiliary police force in the Ziegler villa. However, a fortnight later the guardpost was withdrawn again. "The premises", the AmperBote announced on March 30, "are now at the disposal of the Special Commissioner, Mr. Friedrichs, whose office hours are 8-9 a.m., and the acting deputy mayor, Mr. Beeskow. The deputy mayor deals with applications and orders for deliveries to the concentration camp and can be contacted in the new premises from 9-12 a.m. and 3-5 p.m." Over the following weeks the Nazis established the "Dachau NSDAP Political Head Office" for the area of the "Dachau Market" in the Ziegler villa. The Kreisleitung headed by Hans Freiberger and the local Dachau Ortsgruppe headed by Erhard Beeskow was now located here. The building also held the offices of the ϟϟ (led by ϟϟ Sturmführer Dobler) and the SA (SA Sturmbann 11 led by SA-Sturmführer Taut, SA-Sturmbann 1/2 led by SA Sturmbannführer Rank, SA Reserve led by SA-Sturmführer Nadler, and the SA Engine Company). The Ziegler villa also housed the offices of various National Socialist bodies - the Nazi Factory Cell Organisation (NSBO), the Farmers Organisation, the Civil Servants' Section and the Disabled Veterans' section. The leadership of the Hitler Youth also set up its local headquarters there.

On April 28, 1945, this was the scene of a terrible incident. After the collapse of the so-called Dachau Uprising when an attempt was made to prevent the ϟϟ from defending the town in what was clearly going to be a pointless, destructive act of futility. In response the ϟϟ lined up its five prisoners against the wall of this building and summarily executed them. Those who died in this way were Friedrich Dürr, Anton Hackl, Anton Hechtl, Johann Pflügler, and Lorenz Scherer. Their bodies were left lying on the street in front of the building as a deterrent. A plaque at the execution site today, shown here above during its official unveiling, commemorates the victims of the Dachau Uprising. (The name of Anton Decker, who was also killed by the ϟϟ on April 28, 1945, is not mentioned on the plaque, however.) The town council arranged for the concentration camp prisoners Dürr and Hackl, as well as their comrade Erich Hubmann to be buried in honorary graves at the Dachau Waldfriedhof.

 Across the street and directly in front of the Hörhammerbräu Inn is the red Untersberg marble fountain designed by Ignatius Taschner. It dates from 1915 and  replaced the former town fountain which had been relocated moved to the corner of Wieningerstrasse and what had been Freisingerstrasse, now Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse. Although not seen in my recent photo (taken in November), its sides display the carved figures of locals wearing the traditional dress of Dachau. The older photograph taken from the same spot shows what had been the Hölzl department store, established in 1930 after Karolina (Lina) Hölzl bought the building (which stood on the site of an even older house that was built by an innkeeper shortly before 1589)  and set up a business for fashion, accessories, and cleaning materials. Dachau's new Office of Cultural Affairs, Tourism and Contemporary History has been situated here since April 18, 1997. During the war sections of the catacombs here in the Upper Town served as air-raid shelters, such as the vaults beneath the convent school (from its entrance on Burgfriedenstrasse), the Götschl cellar at Wieningerstrasse 11 and the Zauner cellar. These complemented an air raid shelter with numerous tunnels and shelters which was also built under the schlossberg from May 1944. In the last days of the war prisoners who had escaped from concentration camp work units were hidden by Dachau residents in the labyrinth beneath the Old Town.

Münchener Straße in 1910 and today. In the right background is the so-called "Spatzenschlössl," the stately house of painter, draughtsman, illustrator and local historian Hermann Stockmann. Built in 1899 in the neo-baroque style, is still in a well-preserved condition and is rented to artists by the city of Dachau. Co-founder of the Dachau artist group (Künstlervereinigung Dachau), he was instrumental in the artist group's first exhibition on June 11, 1919 in schloss Dachau. After its dissolution, he became involved in the Dachau Artists' Association, founded in 1927, as its first chairman until 1929 before being made an honorary member. In 1927, on his sixtieth birthday, he was made an honorary citizen of Dachau. Stockmann was represented with two pictures at the Great German Art Exhibition in Munich in 1938 which saw Hitler personally buying his oil painting “Captive Russians” for 2500 Reichsmarks.

Across from the schloss on the parking lot is the former municipal court prison, built in the Bocksgarten on Schlossplatz, not far from the law courts on Schlossgasse. After its completion it attracted so much attention that a picture of it was even published in the Süddeutsche Bauzeitung on February 20, 1909, describing it as having "a guard room, four group cells, and 24 solitary confinement cells." In 1937 the Dachau municipal court prison was equipped to house a maximum of sixty prisoners, as noted by the Chronicle of the Dachau municipal court. Apparently the average number of prisoners was 55 - just under capacity - but frequently there were more prisoners, leading to overcrowding and staff shortages. Plans for building an extension were drawn but not implemented, no doubt due to political considerations in 1937. Such overcrowding resulted mostly because of the transfer of prisoners from the camp, the the three or four prison guards unable to cope.

On the right is the schloss from a Nazi-era postcard and as it appears today, seen from the English Garden. Immediately after the Nazis came to power the municipal court gaol began to play an infamous when Dachau Communists and other local political opponents of the Nazis were held here in protective custody for several weeks on end. Georg Scherer was one of those who was first interned here and then sent to the concentration camp. But even before 1933, Dachau Communists, who came into conflict with the authorities by protesting against unemployment and hunger, were not spared visits to the prison here on Schlossberg hill. During the so-called Bavarian soviet republic a Red Army military tribunal was set up in the prison on April 21, 1919, at the request of Ernst Toller. But the tribunal convened only once, on April 30. It consisted of four soldiers, chosen by their comrades, with Otto Frobler presiding. In his study on the 1918-19 revolution in Dachau, Gerhard Wilhelm reported how a common soldier took on the role of public prosecutor and anyone was entitled to defend the accused. In total only four soldiers were condemned - two for theft, one for being drunk on duty, and another for spreading unfounded rumours. Frobler acquitted all the civilians who had been arrested on suspicion of spying which suggests that there was no real Red Army terror against the citizens of Dachau. 

Inside the schloss's English Garden and, again, from a Nazi-era postcard. One particularly brave figure among those who presided over the court during the Nazi era was Lorenz Meyer, who took over on May 1, 1933. He courageously confronted the ϟϟ and even instituted investigations against the commandant of Dachau concentration camp whenever the death of prisoners was reported to him through official channels. It was to his credit that Carl Wintersberger, the chief public prosecutor, and Josef Hartinger, the senior public prosecutor, became aware of the early fatalities in the camp and initiated actions against the ϟϟ which would lead to the recall of the camp's first commandant, Hilmar Wackerle. Chief municipal court judge Meyer also visited the concentration camp in person to look closely at the scene of each respective crime. For example, on May 18, 1933, as a member of a commission including Dr. Flamm, the regional court medical examiner, and Brücklmeier, a judicial clerk, he visited the prison in the inner compound near the quarters of the 10th Infantry Company to investigate a new ϟϟ crime. On this occasion he took measurements to confirm how limited the freedom of movement was for a Dachau prisoner in solitary confinement in a dark cell. The chief municipal court judge further meticulously noted that windows were boarded up from the outside with wooden slats made from the lids of crates, through which hardly a ray of sunlight could penetrate into the cell. In a report drafted by Lorenz Meyer after the First World War, he described the lengths the ϟϟ went to in order to hinder any investigations in the camp by the judiciary: "In all the instances I can recall, the judicial commission was made far from welcome. It began right at the gate, where the commission had to wait a very long time while the guards phoned headquarters, obtained the commandant's permission for the commission to enter the camp. and then finally opened the gate. The frosty expression on the faces of the ϟϟ men who escorted the commission from the gate to the headquarters in the camp was also revealing."

Looking down from the at the Schlossberg Brewery. Immediately to the left of it is the former Zieglerkeller Inn with its large beer garden (today the Bräustüberl Inn although it appeared shut down when I visited last).

The Dachau ϟϟ was founded in the Zieglerkeller Inn in 1930 - at that time it had just six members. On June 15, 1933, the church holiday of Corpus Christi, an ϟϟ propaganda march from Dachau concentration camp ended in front of the inn. This was the first time the guard unit officially showed itself in public in Dachau.' The procession, headed by the ϟϟ-Sturmhauptführer and Dachau camp commandant Hilmar Wackerle, began at the concentration camp and continued on toward the Upper Town.

The march ended in front of the Zieglerkeller Inn. On June 17, 1933, the Dachauer Zeitung reported: "At 11 a.m. a public concert was held in front of the concentration camp, attended by numerous members of the public. ... The prisoners of the well-known Dachau concentration camp had been assembled behind the large front gates, and packed together, they listened to the rousing music of the SA band. ... That same afternoon at around 3 p.m. a strong detachment of ϟϟ men set off from Dachau concentration camp to the fife and drum of the SA band. They marched through the town to the Zieglerkeller Inn, where a large public concert was held. At the fore was Wäckerle, the commandant of the camp and party member, astride his steed. He was followed by off-duty ϟϟ men from the camp, the Dachau ϟϟ with their Sturmführer Dobler, and an ϟϟ company from Munich. That was a glorious sight to see the youth of Germany was here and marching through Dachau!"

Opposite the Schlossberg Brewery is the brewery cellar which also served the Wülfert meat-processing factory as a cold-storage room during the war. Prisoners from Dachau concentration camp who belonged to the Wülfert work unit did forced labour here.

Klosterstrasse leads from the Schlossberg Brewery past the entrance to the former Wülfert cold storage cellar and down Schlossberg hill to the Wittmann Bookstore on the right on the corner of Klosterstrasse and Augsburger Strasse.

The Wittmann Bookstore is located in a building first mentioned in 1626 and inhabited for centuries by bakers." From 1880 onwards Josef Wittmann and his wife Maria ran a store selling flour, groceries and artists' supplies, and later opened a small publishing business. In the early 1930s Hans Weinzierl opened a drugstore here, which existed until the end of the war.

One of the concentration camp's prisoners, Albert Zeitler, was sent here to do some electrical work where he was secretly given food by Sybille Wittmann. This was completely against Nazi policy despite food packages being allowed to be delivered. On July 1, 1944 the ϟϟ Sicherheitsdienst (Security Service, SD) took over two vacant rooms for office purposes. After his liberation Zeitler set up a lending library in the office with most of the books coming from the camp library which had contained 15,000 volumes. 

Across the street shown on the right in a period photo and today is the Rauffer house where  Ludwig Thoma had his law office from  October 18, 1894, to May 17, 1897, and this is commemorated today by a plaque on the outside wall of this corner house on Augsburger Strasse. Since the business prospects for lawyers in Munich did not seem favourable to him, he chose Dachau, a small town in the surrounding area, as his domicile, after initially considering Erding. He claimed in his memoirs that he "didn't think twice and asked for approval in Dachau. Old gentlemen and concerned friends advised me against it, but I followed the sudden idea and I had no regrets. With not quite a hundred marks in my fortune, I moved into the house of a Dachau master tailor two months later and was the strange example of the first local lawyer for the place and the surrounding area." Such a description in his autobiography is incorrect in three respects: The hundred marks were borrowed from Jakob Frankl, the “master tailor” ran a textile department store, and several lawyers had been admitted to Dachau for many years. Viktoria Pröbstl, who took Thoma into his service after her mother's death, and sisters Marie and Bertha ran the household. The firm did well, Thomas's income rose, and he was later able to draw material for his literary work from the legal cases of his peasant clients.

Thoma became popular because of his realistic and satirical descriptions of everyday life in Bavaria and the political events of his time. Due to the reactionary and anti-Semitic publications in the last years of his life, he has been viewed increasingly critically for several years with a 1989 Spiegel article accusing Thoma of having developed into an angry anti-Semite and a pioneer of Hitler in old age. Lawyer Otto Gritschneder emphasises his six weeks imprisonment in Stadelheim in 1906 for his poem published in Simplicissimus seen as "insulting by some members of a morality association" and "the extremely anti-Semitic and anti-democratic vulgar essays Thomas from his last years in the Miesbacher Anzeiger" as dark stations in Ludwig Thomas' life. He also points out that Thoma never submitted his doctoral thesis, but nevertheless called himself "Doctor Ludwig Thoma", which should be mentioned in the case of an author who is so critical of his fellow men. His biographer Martin A. Klaus, who researched Thoma for more than three decades, is convinced that Thoma knew Hitler personally through the mediation of the writer Dietrich Eckart.

The Gasthaus Drei Rosen on the corner of Münchener Straße and Ludwig-Dill Straße. For two years before the war this had been the home of Heimito von Dodero, nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature five times. He joined the Austrian Nazi Party on April 1, 1933 as member 1,526,987 along with his publisher Rudolf Haybach. He would later write how, already by the end of 1929, he saw how “Judaism in Austria, and especially in Vienna, would be of overwhelming importance in decisions that were already being felt at the time have to."A manuscript with the title “Speech about the Jews” dated June 1936, in which Doderer draws a positive conclusion on the Nazi seizure of power, euphorically welcomes the Nuremberg race laws and, according to Stefan Winterstein, who describes the speech as a “hate speech” equates Hitler indirectly with the Messiah. In August 1936 Doderer moved here, never making any reference to the concentration camp there in diary or letters. Since the Austrian Nazi Party had been banned on June 19, 1933, Doderer renewed his party membership in Dachau and at the same time submitted an application for admission to the Reichsschrifttumskammer. Regarding Doderer's further relationship to the Nazis, Alexandra Kleinlercher speaks of “progressive disenchantment” starting with his initial disappointment of not having been discovered as a writer by the 'Third Reich'; 1936 and his rejection of what he perceived as socialist about National Socialism. By 1940 he converted to Catholicism and that year was drafted into the Wehrmacht . He would never however leave the Nazi Party, referring to his “barbaric error” in the May 5, 1946 entry of his diary. He was posted to Oslo in April 1945 at the very last stages of the war being released from captivity in Norway at the end of the year, and at the end of January 1946 returning to Austria but - out of fear of being punished for his former membership in the Nazi Party- not to Vienna which was partly occupied by the Soviets.

Ludwig-Thoma-Strasse ends at the bridge over the Amper River. This bridge was originally made of wood. In 1928 a stone bridge was built and the old Steinmühlstrasse was renamed Ludwig-Thoma-Strasse. This bridge links Ludwig-Thoma-Strasse with Münchener Strasse. On the bridge you can see the statue of Saint Christopher with the Christ Child, created by Dachau sculptor Walter von Ruckteschell.

 It was quickly rebuilt in stone after the end of the war, with the reopening ceremony taking place on August 11, 1945. The American commandant of the town at the time, Captain Malcolm A Vendig, cut through the white ribbon, and said: "Just as this bridge is built on a strong foundation, so, too, should Germany rebuild upon the strong base of freedom and democracy!" Mayor Linmaier delivered a speech in which he commemorated the men who took part in the Dachau Uprising after which parish priest Pflanzelt gave the church's blessing. The official paper Amtsblatt für die Stadt und den Landkreis Dachau reported that Linmaier "pointed out... that the old bridge was destroyed whilst American tanks were already approaching Dachau. In the final hours, a small group of courageous anti-Fascists had tried to free the town from terror at the last minute and to hoist the flag of freedom. But they were defeated by the superior ϟϟ force, and then this bridge, like so many others, was destroyed. This was a symbol of the ruins that the Nazi system left behind. Yet, as the bomber aircraft were still flying south over the town, the first attempts to rebuild this bridge were being made. This was only possible thanks to the assistance given by the military government, and the town authorities expressed their sincerest thanks."

The Ludwig Thoma school, opened in 1930 at the entrance to the town's fairgrounds which were located here after the end of the Great War. On the night of August 22, 1934 there was a massive brawl here between locals and members of the Austrian Legion; in fact, an emergency police unit from Munich had to come to sort it out. Two years later the following remarkable letter from the local priest. Friedrich Pflanzelt, was sent to the diocese's office in Munich:

The town has become much more peaceful since the [Austrian Legion] left, although the German ϟϟ aren't exactly angels! If I were to describe the general mood in Dachau, I would have to say that the people of Dachau would be infinitely happier if they could have their old town back as it used to be! The trend of people leaving the church discloses a terrible and gloomy picture: 439 members of the ϟϟ! 14 faithful members of the parish!

Just before the Munich conference in 1938 a journalist, Paul Herterich, described the dark mood at the fair:

Men wearing black uniforms and steel helmets patrolled the beer tent. Whilst the band played the Egerland March the people's cheerful laughter was silenced by the synchronised march of the ϟϟ.

The school's annex was soon deemed unhygienic for students and teachers and in 1933 became a Hitler Youth hostel with the fairgrounds serving as a marching ground for the town's Hitler Youth as well as a site where they would engage in pledge rituals, flag ceremonies and sporting events. The site also supported the Deutsches Jungvolk for boys and Deutsche Jungmädel for the girls. Under the Nazis the school itself supported the Luftwaffe as a decree from May 13, 1938 sets out:

As a result of the negotiations with the Reich Air Defence League, it has been decided to use the attic of the boys' school on Ludwig-Thoma Straße to set up an air raid protection training centre with two lecture halls and a practice room and the required auxiliary rooms.

Hofmann (now a retired colonel) headed the Dachau Association for the Protection of Children until his death on June 2, 1936. The Dachau parish priest Friedrich Pflanzelt succeeded him as chairman of the association on November 8, 1936.

In the 1930s the kindergarten was known as Haus Nazareth, and in 1938 the mayor of Dachau, Hans Cramer, decided that it should be taken over by the NS-Volkswohlfahrt (National Socialist People's Welfare Organisation, NSV). This proved to be difficult at first, because the kindergarten was run by a registered charity. There followed a long and fruitless struggle to prevent the charity from being dissolved, in which Pflanzelt, the parish priest, was particularly active. But the kindergarten was taken over by the NSV on March 1, 1940, on orders from the State Police headquarters in Munich.

On March 30, 1940, County Administrator Dr. Emil Böhmer declared the kindergarten dispute to be resolved, and the Nazi leadership was quick to express its thanks for the successful outcome. On April 9, department head Sandtner from the People's Welfare Office wrote to the new Dachau mayor, Carl Dobler, who had replaced Cramer "On behalf of the National Socialist Welfare Organisation I would like to express my sincerest thanks for your efforts in placing the Catholic Nazareth kindergarten in Ludwig-Thoma-Str. in the hands of the town. I will soon be sending party member K., the Gau administrator, to Dachau so that the kindergarten can now be run according to the principles of National Socialist Welfare and the party. The necessary measures with regard to the organisation and restructuring ... can be put into writing on site."

With this Haus Nazareth was renamed NSV-Kindergarten. After the war the former name was restored. Pflanzelt's application for the kindergarten to be returned to the Dachau Association for the Protection of Children was approved, and in 1975 it was taken over by the Caritas Association.

The editorial offices of the local newspaper Amper-Bote, founded in 1872 and closely associated with the Bavarian People's Party during the Weimar Republic. During the July 1932 national elections, stones were thrown at its windows with five of its seven windos shattered. When the Nazis took power the paper was taken over by the SA and merged with the Dachauer Zeitung. Its front pages were headed with the legend "Official Gazette of all Dachau Authorities and Communities of Dachau County" as well as serving as the "Party Organ of the NSDAP." Its January 11, 1934 issue repeated reports of the concentration camp's exemplary equipment, the good food, excellent medical care, quality of the sports area, and extremely hygienic conditions. It went on to claim that inmates only had to work three to four days and only two inmates had died, with reports of abuse belonging “absolutely to the realm of fables.”

It was shut down after the war but was restarted in 1952 as an advertising journal.

Concentration Camp Memorial Cemetery Dachau-Leitenberg

The Dachau Leitenberg concentration camp cemetery in the Dachau district of Etzenhausen has been a concentration camp cemetery for some of the victims of the Dachau concentration camp near Munich since 1959. The burial site of Leitenberg, originally laid out as a mass grave by the ϟϟ in 1945, includes the individual graves of 7,609 concentration camp inmates after reburial in the post-war period. The first mass graves at this place were found between February 28 and April 27, 1945, although the first mass grave may have already been dug there in October 1944 when eight large mass graves were laid by prisoner detachments on the Leitenberg on the instructions of the commandant's office of the Dachau concentration camp. Up until the liberation of the Dachau concentration camp on April 29, 1945, there is evidence that 4,318 concentration camp inmates were buried there. According to the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site,

[t]here is demonstrable proof that 4,318 dead concentration camp prisoners were buried there up until liberation on April 29, 1945. A further 1,879 dead prisoners as well as regular German army troops killed in fighting around Dachau were buried in two further mass graves by May 18, 1945 at the latest...

... according to counts made by the responsible authorities, a total of 7,609 dead are buried at the concentration camp cemetery Leitenberg, of whom only 204 are known by name.

 In order to stem the spread of typhus and typhus , American soldiers buried another 2,000 to 2,400 corpses of concentration camp prisoners in a second complex of neighbouring mass graves in May 1945, both corpses found in the concentration camp and those from the death train from Buchenwald. To do this, Dachau civilians had to transport twelve carts, each carrying thirty to forty corpses, through the town to the Leitenberg in columns for days. Up until May 18, 1945 alone, 1,879 concentration camp prisoners were buried in two mass graves, along with forty Wehrmacht soldiers who died in the battles around Dachau. After the liberation, Dachau was under quarantine due to an American order , as typhus and typhus were rampant on the premises. Nevertheless, there were further epidemic deaths among the initially surviving prisoners, and former prisoners also died as a result of malnutrition. At least until May 18, 1945, a further 1,879 deceased prisoners and Wehrmacht soldiers who had fallen in fighting around Dachau were buried in two additional mass graves. 

On the right, Dachau residents are shown transporting the dead to the cemetery at Dachau-Leitenberg on the left, and depositing the bodies on arrival.

In the immediate post-war period, the former Dachau concentration camp served as accommodation for displaced persons, homeless and sick former prisoners until July 1945.  Subsequently, the American military authorities established the Dachau internment camp for war criminals, members of the ϟϟ and Nazi Party officials on the site. This "War Crimes Enclosure" had a capacity of 30,000 people. From 1947 to 1948 it was gradually handed over to the German authorities.  In 1945, the American army and, as a result, the military government obliged the city of Dachau to erect an appropriate memorial for the dead on Leitenberg which the town delayed for years. 

In August 1949, René Simon, a former prisoner of the Dachau concentration camp, was taking a walk on the Leitenberg and accidentally came across human bones that had previously been uncovered during sand mining. He informed the local Association of Victims of the Nazi Regime (VVN). The cemetery administrator actually claimed that the bones were from a mediæval settlement. According to forensic medicine, they in fact had lain in the ground for fifty to 100 years. But there was an international discussion about the neglected state of this last resting place for concentration camp victims, leading to the "Leitenberg scandal".  

Last but not least, these controversies about an appropriate way of dealing with the commemoration of the dead led to the addition to the Franco-German Protocol on the End of the Occupation Regime in the Federal Republic of Germany of October 23, 1954 in Paris, which additionally stipulated “that memorial sites with the remains of victims of National Socialist rule must be permanently secured and made accessible”. 

On December 16, 1949, the preliminary inauguration of the Leitenberg concentration camp cemetery took place. In 1951 the shell of the octagonal memorial hall was erected, ten metres high and nine metres in diameter. It was completed by the summer of 1952, and the inauguration was initially postponed and then forgotten. The French tracing service had the graves exhumed between 1955 and 1959 in order to transfer the dead identified as French nationals to France, as well as those from Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Italy. The remaining dead were reburied on the Leitenberg, together with more than 1,200 exhumed concentration camp victims from other concentration camp cemeteries in Upper Bavaria and 226 dead from the concentration camp burial ground of Dachau's Waldfriedhof. In total, more than 400 concentration camp cemeteries in Bavaria including the sub-camps in Baumheim and Lauingen on the Danube, as well as victims of the concentration camp sub-camp complex Mühldorf who were reburied after the war in Altötting, from graves through death marches in Luhe-Wildenau. 

Webling

This tiny hamlet just to the Northwest of Dachau was the site of a massacre the day the camp was liberated. A Waffen-ϟϟ unit had arrived to take up defensive positions in trenches dug around the farms by French PoW workers in order to delay the advance of American tanks of the 20th Armoured Division and infantry units of the 7th US Army which was approaching Dachau. The farms, mostly run by women (whose husbands were either dead, prisoners of war or still fighting) with the help of French PoWs, came under fire on the morning of April 29 forcing all inhabitants to rush for the cellars. One soldier of Company F of the American 222nd Infantry Regiment of the 42nd Rainbow Division was killed upon entering the hamlet under fire from the Waffen-ϟϟ unit. This led the first German to emerge from the cellar, the farm's owner Herr Furtmayer, to be immediately shot. 
The French PoWs then informed the Americans that that only civilians were actually hiding in the cellars which led the soldiers to round up the men of the ϟϟ unit. The first of those to surrender was an officer, Freiherr von Truchsess, who led a detachment of seventeen men who was then struck with a trenching tool splitting his head open. The others were lined up in the farmyard and summarily shot. On a slight rise behind the hamlet, another group of eight ϟϟ were shot. Their bodies were found lying in a straight line with their weapons and ammunition belts neatly laid on the ground suggesting that the men were shot after they surrendered. Altogether, one ϟϟ officer and forty one men lay dead as the infantry regiment proceeded on their way towards Dachau. Next day the local people, with the help of the French PoWs, buried the bodies in a field to be later exhumed by the German War Graves Commission and returned to their families. The site today is remembered by a memorial; photos above taken on the anniversary of the massacre.

 

A colleague shared this photo he took whilst driving to work. The car in front with Dachau license plates has a yellow star with the legend "Diesel Fahrer".  I found online that "Star of David bumper sticker on a diesel vehicle with Dachau license plates is an example of antisemitism and trivialisation of the Holocaust seen on an increasing basis in Germany. Such displays are usually seen related to vaccines and Corona, but in this case, related to diesel engines. In the right-radical spectrum, the Greens and Greta Thunberg are often displayed as Nazis with regard to stances against internal combustion engines and specifically diesels in the wake of dieselgate."