Today, we returned to Radius Tour's office to take the Dachau KZ (concentration camp) Tour. We set off with our tour guide Ian and our large group on the train 1 stop to the town of Dachau and then a 10 minute bus ride to the memorial site. It was cool and drizzling - the perfect setting for what lay ahead.
We arrived at the visitor's centre and from there made our way to the jour house, where the wrought iron gate to the camp stood with the words: Arbeit Macht Frei - work sets you free - a misleading statement to the prisoners held inside. Inside the compound, we noticed how much empty space there was. Ian explained to us that it was for roll call 2 times a day. But as Ian explained, roll call, much like the purpse of the whole camp, was used by the Nazis as a way of stripping people of their possessions, identity, and dignity. Sometimes roll call could last hours in the blazing heat or in the freezing cold, and if some people collapsed, others were not allowed to help them. Sometimes even those that died in the baracks had to be dragged out in order to be counted.
Dachau was used as a 'distribution centre' to transfer prisoners to an extensive network of subcamps. The camp had a mostly male population made up of jews, political and religious prisoners, 'anti-socials', JWs, Homosexuals, and conscientious objectors.
Next, we walked to the memorial where two sculptures stood. One representing the numerous victims fused in barbed wire, and another one with different coloured triangles to represent the different categories the Nazis made the prisoners sew onto their uniforms.
Then we went inside the museum/exhibition area where Ian pointed out where the beams for hanging prisoners used to be. As a form of torture, prisoners used to be punished for any little thing by being cuffed behind their backs and hung on these beams, causing much pain, and often dislocating their shoulders. We also saw panels explaining how the Nazis used to conduct medical experiments on the people - freezing, high pressure, death thresholds, etc.
From there, we went to the cinema to catch a 30 minute movie showing footage taken from the Allies' liberation as well as from the Nazi's pictures of the camp. The camp was actually announced as a new prison as a solution to overcrowding in the Munich prison. People were told, and even shown pictures of prisoners being reformed, when in fact, the Nazis were hiding a lot of what they were doing from the German people. The movie footage was very disturbing, and really causes one to question man's inhumanity to man. Although dated, it serves as an educational tool to expose the atrocities that were allowed to occur.
It showed pictures of the dead, emaciated corpses in piles that the Americans found after liberation. This was because the Nazis ran out of coal to continue cremating the bodies. By the 1945, Dachau had also become a collection centre for the dead or dying, so the Allies saw train cars full of dead prisoners as well as piles of dead bodies in the camp's crematorium. They were so shocked by what they found that they made the people of Dachau go up to the camp and view the bodies.
After the movie, we saw the SS Baracks which also housed the more 'favored' prisoners and those who were given solitary confinement. Each room had a radiator, advanced for its time, but for those being punished, heat would be turned on in the summer, and turned off in the winter.
Then we made our way to the two crematoriums, outside of the double moated and barbed wired fence surrounding the camp. Here, they burned the bodies. The first one wasn't enough to keep up with the bodies, so a second one was built later into the 12 years the camp was running. This second one had a gas chamber, but there was no evidence of it eve being used.
Before we finished our tour, we had about 40 minutes to look around ourselves. Pete and I went to look at the site where the prisoner baracks once stood: 17 foundation outlines on either side of camp divided by a row of trees. We also looked into the sample barracks set up by the museum. Bunks 3 high made of planks of wood, 18 rows = 54 people per room in 1933, to grow into hundreds by 1944.
After the barracks, we made our way back to the bus station to catch our train back to Munich, thoroughly sobered, humbled, and thankful for our freedom.
We left The Radius group and headed off to BMW Welt (BMW World). The showroom and visitor's centre was a neat futuristic building with a spiral at one end, and the headquarters is ahaped like 4 cylinders - pretty creative for 1972 :b There were a couple of neat cars on the main reception level - highlights include the new 6er cabrio and an Isetta.
The tour of the plant started in the press shop as we watched massive 2000 ton presses stamp out body parts for the 3er sedan and touring. On one end of the shop, you could see BMW setting up new 10,000 ton presses with reduced tool change times from 1/2 hr down to 5 minutes and two-at-time press capability. Next, we were led through the welding shop-fully automated with KUKA robots-it was fun to watch them working at speed, programmed to handle both the touring and sedan models without any tool changes. The speed at which the machines worked "in harmony" while dealing with tolerances within a fraction of a millimeter was quite a sight. The weld tips were also automatically milled off after several welds and replaced. BMW seems to pay a lot of attention to corrosion protection too-dipping all parts in a zinc bath again after welding and trimming. The assembly was off limits, but the final welding of the body shell was fun to watch-12 robots working in unison, contorting their "shoulders", "elbows" and "wrists" to tack the body together in under a minute.
The Munich plant looks like it's been fairly creative with its space constraints (being in the middle of the largest Bavarian city). We could see robots being placed on mezzanine levels and conveyer line ramps to move parts through the fabrication and assembly process. Pretty impressive with 900 cars finished per day and just 40 hours to produce a 3 sedan/touring from start to finish.
Next we toured the paint shop. The factory tries to paint in batches of roughly 20 but switching between colours is a seamless process. The highlight of this section was watching a huge spinning wheel of emu feathers just upstream of the paint chambers-emu feathers! Who knew? Apparently, they're very good with picking up dust without shedding! BMW changes these 'feather brushes' semi-annually, so emus are in demand for the company!
After we finished at the plant, Mimes felt like buying a car...no, we made a stop at The Hohf Brau Haus to take a peek inside b/c we never got a chance to see what it was like. The oompa band was playing, and there was a huge party! Then, we went to pick up our rental car at the train station and swung by the hotel to pick up our luggage.
Munching on delicious sandwiches from Rischart, a bakery chain we picked up sandwiches for lunch from today as well, we drove through the early evening to Fuessen, our first stop on the romantaschiche road...