June 29th - Dachau

The Royal Hotel in Munich has a large eating area, it has a more modern feel not like the other places we have stayed so far.

 They have cereal, yogurt and danishes on one table.













On the large counter they have breads, meat and cheeses, eggs, bacon & sausage, on the other side is fruit and a machine that makes different coffees, hot water or hot milk by the cup.

My yummy breakfast.

Today we purchased a ticket to be able to use the all the Munich transportation for the 5 of us on 1 ticket and it cost 13,60 eruo.  We wanted to go out to Dachau.








It is free to go in.  This is the gate that all the inmates entered by.  The saying on the gate in English translates to "Work makes you free."

There was a lot of information and pictures to take in.  They showed a very heartbreaking movie that there were points  you could have heard a pin drop. I don't think we could ever imagine what these people went through







They had to wear patches on their clothes that let people know why they were here.  You could be imprisoned because you were a Jew, Hungarian, Romanian, Homosexual, Jehovah Witness, if you came back from another country, if you had romantic relations with a Jew, were a criminal or talked against the Nazi party or for any other reason they wanted to come up with.












There was just so much information to take in.

 Dachau was first concentration camp.  It was first used to house political prisoners.  It was also a work camp.

Then during the war they used this as a place that they checked them in and then sent them to other camps depending on what they were good for.  A lot of people were sent from here to Auschwitz.  This was not a camp that they did large mass killings but still a lot of people died and were killed here.  They also used them for medical experiments.



This statue was very moving especially after watching the movie that they show from live footage from the concentration camp from before the war and when the US soldiers came to save them.










This bunker where used for special prisoners, such as the man that had tried to assassinate Hitler, priests, guards from the camp and political people who opposed the Nazi's.

They talked about how they had a cell that they had set up 2'6" Sq. sections that they would put prisoners in for 72 hours with no light, food or water.  It was so small they had to stand the whole time.

From the look of this building you would never guess it housed a gas chamber and a crematorium. We walked through the rooms that first they told them that they were going to take a "shower".  Then the room that they would undress in before they would go into the "shower".  They had fake shower heads on the ceilings of the gas chamber so that they would go in willingly. They next room was were they kept the dead bodies until they could cremate them.  Then the next room was the crematorium and on the other side of that was another room to keep the dead bodies in.

This was the nicer barracks that they kept the prisoners in before the war.

They never had any privacy, not to mention the fact that they couldn't use even these unless it was when they woke up or before they went to bed.

 This is the type of beds they used during the war.

It is hard to imagine as you walk through some of the area that looks so serene that such horrible things happened here within the last 80 years.  The rain and gray skies were very fitting for today.

We headed back into Munich to have lunch at a very European restaurant.

I bet you didn't guess KFC.

Elaine & Amanda went shopping for a little while then Roger made us walk up hill both ways in the pouring rain 5 miles to get ice-cream at the Eis-Cafe  Sarcletti at Nymphenburger Strasse 155, because our tour operator told us it was the best ice-cream in Munich.

We were going to make him buy us the ice-cream like the ones displayed in the window but they were 26 euros.

But we settled for 3 scoops each.

My favorite flavor was the hazelnut.
Amanda's favorite flavor was caramel nut.
Roger's favorite flavor was banana.

We took a bus and a train to get back to the hotel.

So now we are back at the hotel and we need to pack because in the morning we head to Salzburg.

It looks like a tornado swept through our room.

Well we didn't even scratch the surface of what could be seen in Munich so we may need to have to come back one day.