Favorite Historical Places You’ve Visited

BearsWiin said:

GrundleStiltzkin said:

BearsWiin said:

I chiseled a gloryhole in the Berlin Wall, does that count?

Yes

Gloryhole too high

Not for The Throbber or @YellowSnow

ApostleofGrief said:

YellowSnow said:

BearsWiin said:

YellowSnow said:

ApostleofGrief said:

Standing inside the gas chamber at Dachau on a freezing day. You don't understand humanity until you do this. Not good... in order to really understand life, though, you have to do this! I'm not anti-semitic. It is just that it's the only way to get the man-inhumanity-to-man issue.

The mind boggling thing is that Dachau paled in comparison to the other German death factories further to the East.

Mauthausen is pretty sobering, too

Dachau and Mauthausen are notable for being amongst the first camps and the places where the Germans got their reads down. Something like 31,000 were killed and Dachau and 120,000 to 300,000 at Mauthausen. These figures by themselves are horrific. But the final solution really got going at Auschwitz (1,000,000 killed) and Treblinka (900,000 killed).

Where did you get these numbers? Personally, I would be suspicious since the authorities disclaim the chamber at Dachau was even used. It look used, big time. Anyway, I leave the arguments to the historians.

Dachau was the first concentration camp, and IIRC it was operational through the 1930's so they had many years pre-Final Solution to kill gypsies, artists, Jews, gays, etc. there. Chambers were used later, when it was deemed cost-ineffective to shoot that many people. I don't recall seeing chambers at Dachau, but I remember the crematoria

Not specifically about Dachau, but Tim Snyder's Bloodlands gives a good recounting of the Nazis' efforts to figure out industrial-scale killing on the Eastern Front. We think of gas chambers and huge concentration camps, but a couple million people were just shot and buried in mass graves dug near their villages.

BearsWiin said:

ApostleofGrief said:

YellowSnow said:

BearsWiin said:

YellowSnow said:

ApostleofGrief said:

Standing inside the gas chamber at Dachau on a freezing day. You don't understand humanity until you do this. Not good... in order to really understand life, though, you have to do this! I'm not anti-semitic. It is just that it's the only way to get the man-inhumanity-to-man issue.

The mind boggling thing is that Dachau paled in comparison to the other German death factories further to the East.

Mauthausen is pretty sobering, too

Dachau and Mauthausen are notable for being amongst the first camps and the places where the Germans got their reads down. Something like 31,000 were killed and Dachau and 120,000 to 300,000 at Mauthausen. These figures by themselves are horrific. But the final solution really got going at Auschwitz (1,000,000 killed) and Treblinka (900,000 killed).

Where did you get these numbers? Personally, I would be suspicious since the authorities disclaim the chamber at Dachau was even used. It look used, big time. Anyway, I leave the arguments to the historians.

Dachau was the first concentration camp, and IIRC it was operational through the 1930's so they had many years pre-Final Solution to kill gypsies, artists, Jews, gays, etc. there. Chambers were used later, when it was deemed cost-ineffective to shoot that many people. I don't recall seeing chambers at Dachau, but I remember the crematoria

Not specifically about Dachau, but Tim Snyder's Bloodlands gives a good recounting of the Nazis' efforts to figure out industrial-scale killing on the Eastern Front. We think of gas chambers and huge concentration camps, but a couple million people were just shot and buried in mass graves dug near their villages.

I remember the part of Dachau which looked like gutters in a field, and the signs indicated that they just mowed down prisoners here. This is dark shit, man!