Marc's Public Blog - Trips to other locations

After not enough time in Munich, we had to head out for Dachau, Germany's oldest concentration camp. While it was never used for mass killings, thousands of people did die there due to deliberate bad treatment, and/or being literally worked to death. There was a gas chamber there, but it was mostly not used. Gassing was mostly done at Auschwitz in Poland.
The Dachau memorial had lots of rooms with static displays to read. I found the ones about medical and human endurance tests done against prisoners specifically interesting since I didn't know much about that side of what had happened:

reconstructed barracks were prisoners and detainees were piled up

there were many such barracks but they're not here anymore

cremation chamber

gas chamber, never really used at mass scale there, but probably identical to the one(s) in Auschwitz

walking through this room does not make you feel good obviously

After Dachau, our ulimate destination was Rothenburg, but we stopped by two recommended quaint towns on the way. We started with Nördlingen, a nice medieval town with fully intact town wall and entrance towers:

we then walked portion of the town wall

We then went to Dinkelsbühl:

We then finished our drive to Rothenburg, where we arrived in time to check in, despite google maps driving directions being all wrong for small towns with pedestrian streets again, have a quick dinner by the main plaza, and join the join watchman tour. That tour was a small night walk with an entertaining guide with stories about the town's history. Amongst other things, it was part of a 30 year war between catholics and protestants, or some other flavour of the same religion that's just different enough to justify killing hundreds of thousands of people over. Then, the town narrowly avoided being carpet bombed by the Americans as they were taking over Germany because someone in charge had pictures his mom brought back from a trip there, and knew it was a beautiful city (just like Kyoto was also spared because a general had his honeymoon there):