The First KZ Is Created - Publicly Announced...!


The 32-year-old man who invited journalists from the Bavarian newspapers to a press conference at the Munich police headquarters on March 21, 1933 hardly seems threatening...:



His round wire-rimmed glasses, the mustache and the unironed "brown shirt" hardly match his title - "acting police chief"....:



But no reporter takes up the contradiction. Exactly three weeks after the Reichstag fire in Berlin and in the middle of the NSDAP's seizure of power in Bavaria, too, everyone knew about the danger.

Rather, the press representatives reported as precisely as possible what Heinrich Himmler - after all, he is every police chief - tells them:

“On Wednesday the first concentration camp will be opened near Dachau. It has a capacity of 5000 people. Here all the communist - and as far as necessary: ​​Reichsbanner and Marxist - functionaries who endanger the security of the state are gathered together."

It was not possible to keep the arrested communists in the court prisons indefinitely - and just as impossible to release them.

The still largely unknown NSDAP functionary Himmler adds:

"We took this measure without regard to petty concerns, in the belief that we were doing so to reassure the national population and act on their behalf."

March 21, 1933 is a key date in the history of the Nazi state because the concentration camp system was launched on this day.

The first 150 prisoners arrive in Dachau on the following day...:



The first 150 prisoners brought to an abandoned ammunition factory in Dachau quickly turned into thousands, then within a few years hundreds of thousands, and in the Second World War finally millions of prisoners in tens of thousands of camps, large and small.

The first murders were committed in Dachau on April 12, 1933, just one day after SS men had been called in to guard the prisoners - police officers and SA men had done this before...:



Dachau, as the first systematically built concentration camp, subsequently becomes a model and training camp for all SS guards...



...and at the same time will exist the longest of all Nazi KZ's!





Only on April 29, 1945, and thus just one day before Hitler committed suicide in Berlin, did soldiers of the US Army free more than 15,000 survivors, most of them close to starvation!





The Americans will also find many dead...:





For at least 41,566 people, the liberation will come too late - they will be murdered in the Dachau concentration camp and its satellite camps, perished under the deliberately unbearable "living conditions"...







... or choose suicide to avoid suffering...:



And we hold:
The protective claim of the Germans, expressed thousands of times after the war - "We didn't know anything!" - turns out to be a lie once again, because the Nazis had announced the establishment of the concentration camps in the newspaper, which everyone could read.

"we didn't know anything" referred to the organized mass murder inside Concentration Camps - for purpose camps in the East like Auschwitz and Maidanek were choosen by Himmler. There were no newspaper reports about these actions and so the existence of the Concentration Camps was public knowledge - not so the Industrial annihilation of human beings conducted inside the camps. Judging the people today that lived within the reach of murderous regimes back then is easy if you don't have to face the consequences they had to accept for opposing people like Himmler and the Nazis. IMHO this judgement that everyone was in the know is oversimplification of the past.

Thanks Martin,

My maternal grandfather, who was Hungarian jew, was taken to Dachau after some slave labor in the eastern front. In April 1945, at the age of 37, he was released by the Americans, as you mentioned, weighing only 30 kgs, his pre-war coal-black hair turning all white. As a kid I remember him telling me about other starving survivors who died from too fast over-feeding by well intent (but lacking medical knowledge and training) American GIs.

Benny