September 14, 2014 -- Day 2 -- Sunday

 Happy 20th Birthday, Sarah!!!

Everybody got a good night’s rest.  I was up first about 5:30am.  When I first woke up I had no idea what time it was.  My phone still had USA time on it, so I was thinking that I had only slept for a few hours.  But I answered a text to Amanda and she confirmed that it was indeed morning where I was.  That was a relief, because I felt wide awake and didn’t want to still have to try and sleep for several more hours.

Everyone else was up by 7:30am and we all got ready to go to church. 

We drove into Munich and attended the Munich 3^rd ward sacrament meeting.  A nice missionary, Elder Spencer from Oregon, gave us headsets and translated the meeting for us.  We thought, based on the meeting start time on lds.org that we would be attending the entire block, but it turned out that they had sacrament meeting last.  We were kind of disappointed because we wanted to attend classes in another language.  But it was still a great experience for everyone to see the church in action in another country.

One of the sisters in the ward introduced herself to us before the meeting.  She says her father used to work with grandpa Fetzer way back when he was mission president.  I thought that was pretty great.  Her name was Becky, but I didn’t get the last name.

After church we took some pictures outside the building, and then we drove straight to Dachau to tour the concentration camp. 

Dachau has changed a lot since we toured there in 1990.  I remember when we were there before, we drove up to the side of the camp and just walked onto the property where the old building foundations are still showing.  Now, there is a big parking facility, and a major tour set up to educate visitors.  There is a movie and hundreds of wall displays that tell about individuals, both captives and captors, the political changes that occurred during the 12 years it was an SS camp, and many other interesting facts.

They had a lot of information about the political prisoners who were kept there.  Starting in 1933, Dachau was the main concentration camp where the Nazi’s kept all their political enemies.  But by 1936 it started to house people who were just considered unfit….Jews, Gypsies, priests of all denominations, etc.

I guess 1933 was the year that the Nazi party was able to convince the German government to suspend civil rights in the interest of preserving the motherland.  Once freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, the right to bear arms, and the right to have a fair trial before you could be imprisoned were gone, there was nothing stopping the Nazi’s from arresting anyone who was a “threat” to the country.  At first, reports of abuses at Dachau were investigated and there was some attempt to keep things legal, but the propaganda machine was so convincing that the masses didn’t believe the rumors of abuse and murder until it was too late to do anything about it.  Even the international media primarily used the propaganda from the party as their main source of information for several years after 1933.

Anyway, we first went through the main building where the SS kept their “special” prisoners and where most of the torture happened.  There were rooms with double walls and doors to keep any sound from being heard outside the building, and standing rooms that were so narrow, that a prisoner couldn’t even sit down on the floor. 

Then we went through the building where the prisoners were processed upon arrival.  They have most of the wall displays in that building, along with the movie.

After watching the movie, we toured one of the replica buildings where prisoners were housed, sometimes 2000 at a time in a building made for 200.  By the end of the war, so many prisoners were moved from outlying camps into Dachau that there were 38,000 prisoners when the camp was liberated.  It was designed to house 6000.

We then went through the two crematorium buildings and saw the gas chamber that was constructed late in the war, but was never actually used as far as anyone knows.

Two thousand liberated prisoners died after their rescue because they were so emaciated or sick. 

We were all quite humbled by the tour.

Afterward, we drove to Olympic park in Munich and had a late lunch/early dinner at the main restaurant there.  We had schnitzel, chicken curry, spaghetti, and salad, followed by some yummy German desserts.

Then we drove back to our hotel and relaxed for the evening.  It wasn’t much of a birthday for Sarah, but I’m sure it will still be one that she remembers well.  How often do you get a birthday in Europe!?