New visitor center for Dachau concentration camp

By JERUSALEM POST STAFF
Published: APRIL 30, 2009 20:54
A new information center at Dachau opened Thursday to help the hundreds of thousands of people who visit the Nazis' first concentration camp every year understand its history better. International Dachau Committee President Pieter Dietz de Loos said the new visitors center is intended to "connect the past, present and future." More than 800,000 people pass through Dachau every year, many of them schoolchildren. Located off the official grounds, the new center has been designed to blend with the crude architecture of the camp, built in 1933 and used as the model for all future concentration camps. Visitors enter the camp itself through the so-called "Jourhaus" - the camp's original main gate - following in the footsteps of the more than 200,000 inmates from across Europe who were imprisoned there during its 12 years in existence.