Dachau: The First Concentration Camp and the Model for the Rest

Auschwitz has become the name most closely associated with the Holocaust, but the system of camps that made it possible began years earlier, in a converted munitions factory on the edge of a small Bavarian town. Dachau, opened in March 1933, was the first concentration camp established by the Nazi regime. It remained in operation for the entire twelve years of Nazi rule, and what was developed there shaped the camps that followed.

Opening the Camp, 1933

Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Within weeks, following the Reichstag fire and the emergency decrees that suspended civil liberties, the police and the SA arrested thousands of political opponents. On March 22, 1933, Heinrich Himmler, then police president of Munich, announced that a camp for political prisoners would open near the town of Dachau, about 16 kilometers northwest of Munich.

The first prisoners were Communists, Social Democrats, trade unionists, and others who had opposed the Nazi movement. The camp was presented to the German public as a necessary measure of protective custody. In practice it was a place of detention without trial, where prisoners could be held indefinitely and beaten, tortured, or killed with little fear of legal consequence on the part of their guards.

The Dachau Model

In June 1933, Theodor Eicke was appointed commandant. He drew up a detailed set of regulations governing every aspect of life in the camp, from punishments to the daily routine, and he organized the guards into a disciplined SS unit trained to treat prisoners as enemies of the state. This system, sometimes called the Dachau model, was later applied across the network of camps. Many SS men who would run other camps, including commandants of killing centers, received their training or early experience at Dachau.

Who Was Imprisoned

Over time the prisoner population broadened. Jehovah’s Witnesses, Roma and Sinti, men arrested under the law against homosexuality, and people labeled “asocial” or criminal were sent to Dachau. After the Kristallnacht pogrom of November 1938, thousands of Jewish men were arrested and sent to Dachau and other camps, and many were released only after agreeing to emigrate. Dachau also held a large number of clergy, roughly 2,700 in all, most of them Catholic priests, many from occupied Poland.

After the war began, prisoners arrived from across occupied Europe. Conditions deteriorated sharply: overcrowding, hunger, forced labor, and epidemic disease, especially typhus, killed many. More than 200,000 people were registered as prisoners at Dachau and its subcamps, and at least 41,500 deaths have been documented, though the true toll is certainly higher because many prisoners were never recorded.

Forced Labor and Medical Experiments

Prisoners were put to work in the camp’s workshops and, increasingly, in armaments production. More than a hundred subcamps were attached to Dachau, among them the Kaufering camps, where Jewish prisoners, many deported from Hungary and Lithuania, built underground factories in brutal conditions.

The camp was also the site of criminal medical experiments carried out on prisoners without consent. They included high-altitude experiments conducted for the German air force, hypothermia experiments, tests of methods for making seawater drinkable, and the deliberate infection of prisoners with malaria. Many victims died, and others were permanently injured. A gas chamber was built at Dachau in 1942-43, but the evidence indicates it was not used for systematic mass killing the way the chambers at the killing centers in occupied Poland were. Prisoners were instead killed by shooting, hanging, and fatal mistreatment, or sent to other sites.

Liberation, April 1945

As Allied armies closed in on Germany in the spring of 1945, the SS evacuated camps and sent thousands of prisoners on forced marches and transports. In late April, about 7,000 prisoners were sent from Dachau on a march toward the south, and many were shot or died of exhaustion along the way.

On April 29, 1945, soldiers of the U.S. Seventh Army, including men of the 45th Infantry Division and the 42nd Infantry Division, reached Dachau. They found roughly 30,000 survivors in the main camp, many starving or ill with typhus, and a railway train of dozens of cars filled with the bodies of prisoners who had died during transport. Soldiers who had already seen combat described the sight as among the worst they witnessed in the war. Within the camp, prisoners who had been waiting for this day greeted their liberators with a mixture of joy and exhaustion; some did not live long enough to recover.

Justice and Memory

Between 1945 and 1948, American military tribunals tried hundreds of camp personnel and others at Dachau in what became known as the Dachau trials. After the war, the site served for a time as a holding place for suspects and later as housing for refugees. Survivors, led in particular by the International Committee of Dachau, campaigned for a memorial, and the Dachau Concentration Camp Memorial Site opened to the public in 1965. Today it receives hundreds of thousands of visitors each year.

Dachau’s significance lies in its place at the beginning of the story. It shows that the Nazi camp system was not an improvised response to war but a deliberate instrument of terror created at the moment the regime took power, and refined over years until it could be turned to the mass murder of European Jews. To study it is to see how persecution, once legitimized by the state, can escalate step by step.