Saturday 6 September

Up at 8!! Breakfast on the road for what seemed a full day’s sightseeing. First, after several attempts to find the correct road, we head for the Memorial site concentration camp Dachau. The road finding trouble is caused by preparations for the Olympic Games to be held here in 1971. Dachau has a horrible history being the first German concentration camp built in March 1933. Political opponents, Jews, clergymen and so-called “undesirable elements” were to be isolated here as enemies of the “National Socialist” regime in 1937, the camp originally planned for 5000 proved too small. The prisoners had to build a larger camp, finished in 1938. 

The camp office files show a total of more than 206,000 prisoners, registered between 1933 and 1945. In addition many prisoners were taken to Dachau without being registered. The exact figures are unknown. The excellent museum, planned by the Comite International de Dachau shows, from the beginnings of the Third Reich through the rounding up of Jews etc to vivid pictures of prison conditions. The camp buildings excluding the main gas chambers were raised to the ground and now 3 white buildings contain the museum and a reconstruction of “living” quarters. In place of the original huts are white foundations surrounded by stone paths. Three churches have been built, all of modern design, for Catholic, Jews and Protestant. Disturbing morning but worthwhile.

[This should have been included on the 4th - oops]

Back to the town centre, obtained map from tourist office and had lunch in Kanfhof department store (best lunches are always in the store basement – “stand-ups”). Feeling a lot better, we drove on to the Deutches Museum of science and technology, situated on an island in the River Isar about the Ludwigsbrücke. Here for 2/- each we saw superb models of ships, machinery, planes and real planes, boats and submarines. At the top is the Zeiss Planetarium (very good but in German), whilst on the “transport floor” there are hourly demonstrations of railways with model trains. The best 4/- I've [we’ve] spent. Back to tent about 5. This evening is a visit to the Hall of Braichaus (16) beer hall on Platz 19. Here on the first floor we can drank beer on benches and long tables, on the second floor a cheap but good restaurant and on the third floor there’s beer and a ballroom. No Anne and I did not go there.