Dachau Concentration Camp

Scope and content

The collection contains primarily:
Correspondence, orders, rulings, instructions, protective custody orders, general orders, meeting minutes from organisations of former prisoners, inventory reports, strength reports, prisoners lists, lists of those liberated, lists of deceased prisoners, lists of incoming, transport lists, documents from the ill-prisoners barracks, documents relating to work detail, death books, documents reg. orders for payments, social security matters, block books, status reports, „operations book“, lists of the dead, cemetery lists, repatriation lists, post-war reports, index/registry of effects, „certificates of release “ .

History of Concentration Camp Dachau 1933-1945:
On 20 March 1933 at the behest of then Munich Police President Heinrich Himmler, in a vacant ammunition factory near Dachau the first National Socialist Concentration Camp in Bayern was erected. Only a few days after it was opened on 22 March, the first prisoners were interred there: „protective custody inmates“ who were primarily Social Democrats and Communists. Until 11 April 1933 the guarding of the concentration camp was carried out by the Bavarian Regional Police, after that the SS took over the camp. There were approx. 230 prisoners in Dachau at this time. In June 1933 Himmler appointed Theodor Eicke as Commandant of Concentration Camp Dachau who developed the „Dachau Model“, an organizational chart for life in the camp, which became the template for the organization of all the National Socialist Concentration Camps. Dachau also became a training site for the SS-guard units. In the years that followed the SS expanded the persecution measures to include other groups, which involved Jehova´s Witnesses, Sinti and Roma and homosexuals. Furthermore, after the November pogroms in 1938 some 10,000 Jews from all over Germany were taken to Dachau. With the arrival of Austrian prisoners in early 1938 the internationalizing of the prisoner community finally began; in the end this consisted of more than 200,000 people from 27 countries. In order to cope with the growing numbers of prisoners, an expansion of the camp was carried out from 1937 until 1938, with the camp inmates being used as forced laborers: Next to the former ammunition factory 32 living barracks and administration buildings were built, surrounded by seven watch towers, an electrically-charged fence and a moat. The prisoners also had to labor on the grounds of the camp, in the construction of roads and in handicrafts business. As the war continued, the importance of the prisoner labor force for the armaments industry continued to grow. A compact network of up to 160 Dachau satellite camps and labor units arose, most of them erected in the immediate vicinity of armament factories In late 1944, in the two largest external camp complexes near Mühldorf am Inn and near Landsberg/Kaufering tens of thousands of mostly Jewish prisoners worked under catastrophic conditions, which led to a rapid increase in the death rate. From the very beginning the prisoners lived with the constant fear of losing their health or their lives through one of the „camp punishments“ which every SS man could impose, or to be driven to commit suicide. As the war continued these threats grew to increasingly include acts of murder committed by the SS In 1941 the SS started mass shootings of Soviet Prisoners of War. From 1942 Jewish prisoners from Dachau were transported to the extermination camps in occupied Poland. In the same year SS doctors conducted medical experiments on at least 200 inmates, an unknown number of these died from the consequences. Most of the prisoners lost their lives in the final months before the liberation, due to illness and exhaustion or on the death marches. When the camp was liberated on 29 April 1945 the US Army found some 60,000 prisoners there.
Source: Distel, Barbara: Dachau (KZ), in: Lexikon des Holocaust, hg. von Wolfgang Benz, München 2002, p. 45-46 and http://www.memorialmuseums.org/denkmaeler/view/34/KZ-Gedenkstätte-Dachau [Latest access 2012-08-01].