Plan to Set Up Youth Center at Dachau Nazi Concentration Camp Stirs Controversy

Half a century after Germany’s first concentration camp was built, plans to build a youth awareness center at the site have run into opposition from conservatives who would rather forget than educate.

The center’s supporters want to bring young people whose parents were born after the collapse of the Nazi regime into direct contact with their country’s past.

Right-wing state and local politicians oppose the plan, saying Dachau has already suffered enough for its past.

Tourist leaflets on the town seek to counter Dachau’s image as a place of mass murder with descriptions of the castle and the “charming meadow landscape.”

Until the 1930s Dachau was a small Bavarian town with a hilltop castle set in the midst of moor land much admired by Romantic artists.

The concentration camp was opened in March, 1933, in a former munitions factory. According to detailed camp records, 206,206 people were imprisoned there between 1933 and 1945, in increasingly cramped conditions.

Almost 32,000 Jews, priests, Gypsies, criminals, homosexuals, Social Democrats and Communists died there of hunger and mistreatment.

Pseudoscientific experiments on the effects of low air pressure and extreme cold were carried out on prisoners for the benefit of pilots and soldiers on the Russian front. Commandants of other camps came there for training.

The camp, its barbed wire and watch towers carefully restored, stands today on a main road next to a modern industrial complex on the outskirts of Dachau. Run by a private foundation that includes former inmates as members, it was reopened in 1965 as a museum.

At the time, youth leaders and liberal politicians suggested that the average stay of just 2 1/2 hours to visit the museum and the camp was inadequate to take in the horror of what happened there.

Particularly, younger visitors needed a longer visit, perhaps including seminars to give them a chance to discuss the Nazi era and ask questions.

In 1982 church and youth groups, camp survivors’ organizations and the West German Trades Union Federation proposed that a youth center be opened at the camp where young people could learn about the past and also have a chance to meet former camp inmates.

They based their plan on a similar center at the Auschwitz concentration camp in present-day Poland.

A 500-member working group was formed to plan the center but the town council, ruled by Bavaria’s archconservative Christian Social Union, rejected the idea.

Councillor Manfred Probst told the group he welcomed their plan but feared that the center could serve as a base for political agitation. Bavarian Culture Minister Hans Zehetmaier has proposed a youth center in Dachau more in the form of a standard youth hostel.

“Young people should have the chance to spend time in Dachau not just to visit the concentration camp but also to get to know the town and the area,” he wrote in a document describing the plan.

Zehetmaier proposed a foundation to run the camp, with Nazi victims’ organizations represented only in an advisory capacity. Franz Josef Mueller, chairman of the White Rose Foundation and himself a former Dachau inmate, told the state parliament he found this unacceptable.

A public hearing and an emergency session of the state parliament, which Zehetmaier did not attend, brought no progress.

Amid an increasing public dispute the minister offered in December to seek a compromise, but there is no sign as yet of an end to the row.

“We want to be left in peace,” a spokeswoman for the local Christian Social Union youth group Junge Union said.

She said the town already had enough trouble with people signing themselves as Adolf Hitler in the camp visitors’ book and with accusatory Nazi slogans being scrawled on cars with Dachau registration plates abroad.