Auschwitz or Dachau?

mark4183

mark4183

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i know this isnt for everyone and i want to keep it free from debates etc...

I would like to visit one of the camps as per the title of the thread, my problem is that im not sure which?

I have a friend who recently visited Dachau and said it was very emotional but hasnt visited Auschwitz so there is no comparison but got me thinking

Can anyone offer anything on this?
 
mark4183 said:
I would like to visit one of the camps as per the title of the thread, my problem is that im not sure which?
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What are you interested in? What is your purpose for visiting? It's hard to advise without knowing more about what you're looking for.

I haven't been to Dachau, but I've been to Auschwitz and it can be very emotional, even distressing, for some visitors.

Personally, I did find the visit to Auschwitz unsettling, particularly because I was on holiday voluntarily visiting the scene of one of humanity's greatest crimes, a place from which many had desperately tried to escape.
 
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Having visited the Dachau Gedenkstätte we found it to be a profound experience which neither of us would not have missed. I can imagine this would be much the same for the Auschwitz Birkenau Gedenkstätte so either, or both sites would evoke similar responses in a visitor.

Anthony.
 
Mark

I went to Auschwitz last year, and Birkenhau too, it is just down the road, its a day visit incorporating both sites, get to Auschwitz before 10 if you intend to takes photos, as after 10 you have to join a guiding tour, before 10 you can walk where you wish and take photos at your leisure.Its an experience which I am glad I did, and would go back.

The scale of Birkenhau is unbelievable, it covers a massive area.

Phil
 
My brother in law and his wife visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year and found it deeply unsettling and disturbing. They didn't take any photographs because they felt it would be wrong. I respect that, and I also respect the way they explained it, as a personal choice and not a judgement on what other people do.

A lot of the buildings have been preserved, although the SS made a rather feeble attempt to camouflage their crimes by blowing up the crematoria and gas chambers towards the end of the war.
 
I've not been to either, but did go to Belsen a few years ago. A very dark period of human history for sure. I'm sure that there are plenty of opportunities to capture some disturbing images at any of these locations. I took a few pictures in Belsen, but none of them stood a chance of capturing the feeling I took away with me which to be honest leaves me wanting for words to describe.
 
These are places of historical significance. Remnants of some of the worst things that our species has ever done to itself. The people that suffered in these camps wouldn't want to the world to forget and that's why I think it's important that we don't and why you should go and visit. I visited Auschwitz when I was 14 as part of a school trip to Poland and Germany. I remember everything.

Walking through those gates is an experience in itself. I would advise you to visit Auschwitz but only based on my own memories of the place.
 
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KayJay said:
These are places of historical significance. Remnants of some of the worst things that our species has ever done to itself. The people that suffered in these camps wouldn't want to the world to forget and that's why I think it's important that we don't and why you should go and visit. I visited Auschwitz when I was 14 as part of a school trip to Poland and Germany. I remember everything.

Walking through those gates is an experience in itself. I would advise you to visit Auschwitz but only based on my own memories of the place.
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that's the reason I'd want to visit

A couple of years ago we went to Amsterdam , while there we visited the Anne Frank house, it's a book I'm sure we've all read

I had my camera with me, a security guard approached me to remind me pictures weren't allowed, it hadn't even entered my mind to take a picture and I found it sad that they must need to remind people all the time

It was one of the most moving experiences of my life, to be in the rooms exactly as they were , there was a constant line of people and barely anybody spoke

Without experiences like that it would just fade away over time
 
I studied the Holocaust and the concentration camps (which aren't synonymous) years ago, and have kept up my reading, but I'm undecided about visiting any of these places. I don't really know why. I have no personal connection with them, history is littered with atrocities and appalling crimes, and I usually maintain a fair degree of detachment. Maybe, one day.

The only suggestion I'd add is to do some background research before you go. It's a complex subject, and involves far more than the mass murder of the European Jews, although this was a major part of it and probably the best known. From what I've heard, Auschwitz-Birkenau may offer the greatest insights because it was both a slave labour and extermination camp, it was the largest and most notorious of the camps, and the fact that it's fairly well preserved. The one thing I do struggle with though, is a few accounts written by visitors who were actually disappointed that none of the original gas chambers and crematoria are still intact.
 
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There is some fascinating (and grim) reading about the subject.

I have recently read:-
Commandant of Auschwitz.
Theory and Practice of Hell : The German concentration caps and the system behind them.
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the final solution.

I suppose, like many folk, I am looking for an explanation as to how such events could happen.

Never been to any of the camps. I did have a feeling that I should vist Auschwitz. I have a friend who did go with an organised party in which their were children whose parents allowed then to run wild. Don't think I would like that too much.
 
arclight said:
There is some fascinating (and grim) reading about the subject.

I have recently read:-
Commandant of Auschwitz.
Theory and Practice of Hell : The German concentration caps and the system behind them.
Auschwitz: The Nazis and the final solution.

I suppose, like many folk, I am looking for an explanation as to how such events could happen.

Never been to any of the camps. I did have a feeling that I should vist Auschwitz. I have a friend who did go with an organised party in which their were children whose parents allowed then to run wild. Don't think I would like that too much.
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I was born late to my parents, but when she was young, my mother served on the War Crimes Commission. The transcripts of the trials make for quite harrowing reading too. The day Belsen was liberated, my mother saw the British Army's film, went home in a state of shock, bathed and bathed and bathed again and wanted to go to help. Quite rightly, my grandfather would not let her!

However, I'm wryly amused by the title "Auschwitz or Dachau?" I have never visited any of the camps either, but as a Red Sea Pedestrian, we never used to have the choice of which, old boy!

It is perhaps worth recording that Dachau was opened, initially as a political Concentration Camp, only 6 weeks after the Nazis came to power. It's also worth recording that Jewish organisations in the UK knew in 1933 that the Nazis were, for example, murdering old men by inserting high-pressure water hoses but much of the rest of the world didn't want to know.

How did it happen? It happened easily and we haven't changed much nor learnt much. Just ask Stanley Milgram! I'm deliberately going to conflate two threads running in Out of Focus and I am not remotely equating accidents of birth and racial genocide with peoples' choice to enjoy tobacco, but the sanctimonious vehemence shown in the smoking ban thread reminded me only of Mein Kampf. In 1924, Hitler wrote, "The state must declare the child to be the most precious treasure of the people. As long as the government is perceived as working for the benefit of the children, the people will happily endure almost any curtailment of liberty and almost any deprivation.”

We still want to believe what the authorities and the media tell us we should believe, whereas, in fact, liberty [and freedom of speech] is for the people we don't agree with!
 
Yves Geza said:
However, I'm wryly amused by the title "Auschwitz or Dachau?" I have never visited any of the camps either, but as a Red Sea Pedestrian, we never used to have the choice of which, old boy!

!
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I did have a similar thought - there is something a little obscene about the question given the subject matter. ( I used to work with a guy who was at the liberation of Belsen , he never really spoke about it except to say that it would haunt him until he died).

That said I believe that Auschwitz is supposed to be the most intact , so its probably the one to visit if you want to go from a historical perspective.

As to how it happened - mans inhumanity to man has been revealed time and again since the first man picked up a stone , the holocaust and the camps tend to be the one everyone remembers, but history is littered with other instances and no country is immune, whether its Serbs against Bosnians, Hutu's against Tutsi (and vice versa), and so forth. Come to that the first instance of a "concentration camp" was by the British against the Boers - we didn't gas and torture them to death, we just let them die of starvation and disease instead. Could it happen again ? sadly the answer is yes ... Every country or societal group has the potential to behave inhumanely to those identified as its enemies, given the excuse
 
I've only ever visitd Dachau, a moving experience. You not only get to learn about life in the camp but in Dachau Stadt too, the two were linked
 
mark4183 said:
the more im reading, the more im not looking forward to going but i still want too, if that makes sense.

thanks for everyones insights
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Sort of. The camps are part of recent and terrible historical events that took place, just, within living memory. They have a malign, macabre, attraction for some people, but there's a legitimate interest too, which is why some of them have been preserved.

I haven't visited any of the camps and I'm not sure that I want to, because I'm equally unsure of what I would expect to get out of it. I know what happened, and I don't think I would learn much more from going to them, but perhaps they do offer a deeper, possibly more visceral, insight rather than an academic perspective.

Martin Gilbert (British, and Jewish, historian) has written a number of books on the Holocaust. I have some of them. He wrote about leading groups of his post-graduate students on visits which included the sites of the extermination camps. These were largely destroyed and planted over by the SS, towards the end of the war, but he described one of them where the layout has been reconstructed to give a sense of what it looked like. Their guide bent down and scooped up a handful of gravel from the path, held it out, and explained that some of the small chips were fragments of human bone that had worked their way to the surface from the burial pits below the grass. Some of the students, standing in this quiet, wooded, place, were more shocked by this than they had been at Auschwitz.
 
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mark4183 said:
the more im reading, the more im not looking forward to going but i still want too, if that makes sense.

thanks for everyones insights
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Oh I'm 'glad' that I/we went to Belsen. Definitely an experience that altered my perspective on life. There is an excellent and informative visitor centre there that doesn't pull any punches or in any way exaggerate.

I was living in Hamburg at the time and learned a lot more about WWII and the holocaust. The streets all around where I lived had brass plates on the pavements outside each house, with the names of the Jewish families that had been taken away. There were lots and lots of brasses.. Discussing this stuff with my German friends and colleagues was very interesting and worthwhile.

May well go to Auschwitz one day, I'm sure that will be another perspective changing experience.

To say 'enjoy' your visit, seems an odd thing to say, but if you enjoy gaining knowledge and understanding about serious issues of life and humanity, then perhaps that is the right word. I have no doubt that you will value the visit, but it will stay in your head forever..
 
vRSG60 said:
Another option is Sachsenhausen if only because it's just outside one of the best cities in Europe - Berlin.
I've been there and to Auschwitz-Birkenau. It's true what they say, there are no birds, no wildlife at all in these awful places.
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What? There's loads of birdlife around Auschwitz. Plenty of corvids picking around the dirt in the car park at the main part. Perhaps less so at Birkenau but that's probably due to a distinct lack of trees/bushes/habitat within the enclosed area.
 
MartynK said:
My brother in law and his wife visited Auschwitz-Birkenau last year and found it deeply unsettling and disturbing. They didn't take any photographs because they felt it would be wrong. I respect that, and I also respect the way they explained it, as a personal choice and not a judgement on what other people do.

A lot of the buildings have been preserved, although the SS made a rather feeble attempt to camouflage their crimes by blowing up the crematoria and gas chambers towards the end of the war.
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At least one crematorium was blown up by the inmates themselves, whilst the camp was still in operation. That wasn't quite so feeble
 
Crematorium IV was damaged beyond repair during a revolt in October 1944, using explosives smuggled out of the munitions factory by women who were subsequently hanged, after torture and interrogation. It was basically a suicide operation by the sonderkommando who knew Soviet forces were approaching, but realised that they stood little chance of surviving until they arrived. The SS blew up the rest of the crematoria the following month and largely abandoned the camp in January 1945.
 
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A very interesting read, only last week, I was discussing a weekend away, there was the normal places, Dales, the lakes etc, then I mentioned heading to France and the DDay beaches, to try capture something different to our last landscape trip, which led to Auschwitz, hence the search on here and reading this thread.

Still not sure, I would want to go and photograph knowing what happened there
 
npinks said:
A very interesting read, only last week, I was discussing a weekend away, there was the normal places, Dales, the lakes etc, then I mentioned heading to France and the DDay beaches, to try capture something different to our last landscape trip, which led to Auschwitz, hence the search on here and reading this thread.

Still not sure, I would want to go and photograph knowing what happened there
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If it's the 'death' that worries you then the Normandy beaches are not much better, if it's the manner of the deaths then yes. It is disturbing, but remains an experience I haven't forgotten.
 
When I visited a couple of years ago there was a no camera rule which was completely ignored by the masses. It was disturbing but, I feel, we'll worth the experience.

A more relaxing and easier site to get to was Colditz in Germany very interesting.
 
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