Dachau

Located on the outskirts of Munich, Dachau was the first of the Nazi concentration camps.  It was here that Hitler's people developed the methods of torture and control they would later apply to Jews, Roma, homosexuals, the disabled and mentally ill, and political dissidents throughout Europe. Hitler himself never visited a concentration camp, relegating their supervision to his henchmen. Like Terezin, which I wrote about earlier, Dachau was more of a way station than a death camp, though many prisoners were killed here.  In places,  its grounds are picturesque, almost like a college campus.

 They've replaced the original fence of course, which was electrified when the Nazis were in control. Prisoners sometimes suicided by throwing themselves against it.

Because of its proximity to Munich, Dachau was a training center for the S.S., Hitler's brutal police force. It was here that previously normal German twenty year olds were taught how to torture people. Dachau was a center for human medical experiments.  The gas chambers and crematoria which were used so extensively during the Holocaust were developed at Dachau.