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Dachau: 90 years on, the warning remains

Christoph Strack In 1933, the Nazis set up one of the first concentration camps in Dachau, near Munich — it was the start of a system of terror. What is now a memorial site still serves as a warning today. The establishment of theNazi concentration camp in Dachau, northwest of Munich, 90 years ago was the prelude to the regime’s systematic destruction of human beings. The first prisoners arrived at the camp, which is not even 20 kilometers (12.5 miles) from the Bavarian capital, on March 22, 1933 — less than two months after the Nazis seized power on January 30. “Dachau — the significance of this name cannot be exorcized from German history,”  the Holocaust survivor Eugen Kogon (1903-1987), a respected political scientist and journalist, was later to say. “It stands for all the concentration camps that the Nazis put up in the territory they ruled.” Dachau was, indeed, something of a model for further camps of this type. The historian Wolfgang Benz said once that Dachau was where “the structure for all later concentration camps was invented.” In Dachau, for example, the inmates already encountered the motto “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”) on the entrance gate, as was to be the case with later camps. This phrase was a concrete expression of the mockery, the repression and the dehumanization to which the prisoners were subjected…” Never Forget, Always Remember.

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