October 18th, part V - The Nazi concentration camp at Dachau, Germany.

WARNING: Some of the following content is brutal, horrifying, and may be disturbing to visitors of all ages and beliefs. Proceed at your own risk.

The crematoriums were located to the west of the actual grounds of the Dachau concentration camp. Prisoners were marched, dragged, and hauled through the gate seen on the previous page to meet their end here, at the hands of Nazi murderers.

The sign reads, loosely translated, "Remember all who died here."

The crematoriums were in a patch of woods outside of the main camp's fences. A path wound through these woods, skirting the clearing where the buildings were. We walked this path first, curious, not knowing what we would see.

The first thing we came upon was an ash storage pit. The Nazis cremated so many victims, and they did it so quickly, that they actually needed storage space for the ashes.

The second photograph is of one of the several ash graves, where the ashes of thousands of victims were buried.

Further into the woods, we came across two execution ranges. One was marked specifically for pistols. Both had blood ditches. That's right, the Nazis murdered so many people here they built ditches to handle the blood.

There were more ash graves - places where the remains of thousands were buried without tombstones, without identification, with little more than a plain stone marker identifying it as a mass grave.

This is the first crematorium that was built in 1940. Note that it had two ovens in it, and was working over capacity within the first year. Over 11,000 bodies were disposed of in these two chambers.

The Nazis were very efficient indeed.

Obviously, the one small crematorium was insufficient for their needs - they were producing bodies too fast to dispose of, and they felt they weren't going fast enough.

So, in 1943, they opened a new crematorium, with many more ovens and a gas chamber.

The first photograph was taken by a Belgian prisoner in 1944.

The second photograph is of the bodies stacked like cordwood outside of the crematorium, shortly after the Allies liberated the camp in the spring of 1945. Here is a full-size image.

The first stop for the prisoners at the new crematorium was the disrobing room, on the west end of Barrack X.

Prisoners would take off all of their clothes and belongings here, for fumigation. It is important to note that the fumigation was for the prisoners' belongings, not the prisoners themselves. The fires of the ovens would take care of them.

The next stop was the gas chamber. Unlike many of the other concentration camps in the Nazi system, this chamber was not used for mass murder.

Surviving prisoners and guards did state that the SS used it to murder both individuals and small groups, however.

The death chamber was an unremarkable little room, where the bodies of the dead were stacked before being cremated.

One of the ovens in the new Barrack X.

The ovens in the new crematorium. Prisoners were also murdered here - they were hanged from the wooden beams in front of the ovens. Nazis, the picture of efficiency.

Four female British Special Operations officers were murdered in this room in September, 1944, and cremated with the rest of the victims. They fought with the French Resistance.

The sign describing the general crematorium area at Dachau.

A statue stands in front of Barrack X. If I remember correctly, it was of a concentration camp prisoner, perhaps Polish.