Vienna, Munich, and Dachau

After Budapest, we had three days to get to Berne, Switzerland where we were scheduled to meet up with Stefanie Kunzi (distant relative of Joan) on Friday afternoont. We left from Budapest early Tuesday morning, and several hours later we arrived in Vienna where we had a layover for six-ish hours.



a museum in vienna

We walked around Vienna and got to see a few interesting places including a district of museums, governmental buildings, the opera house, and other architecturally impressive buildings. Joan continued her practice of buying street art from all the cities her and Paul visited.



choosing street art from vienna

Later in the afternoon, we found our way back to the train station and traveled to Munich where we had reservations for that night. We arrived later in the evening and went out for some traditional German food.



our real german food in munich

We spent the rest of the evening walking around Munich and seeing what little of it we could at night. The following morning we headed to Dachau, the location of the first concentration camp. While conditions were still horrible, Dachau was primarily a labor camp, so the treatment of the prisoners was far better than what Matt and I had previously seen in Auschwitz.



where the barracks stood in dachau

Dachau was designed to hold 6000 prisoners in its 30 barracks (200 per barrack). By the end of the war, the camp was holding more ten times that amount! There were over 2000 prisoners in each barrack. Without all this slave labor, the German armament industry would not have been able to supply the Army with enough ammunitions to keep fighting the war.



the guards in the tower could shoot anyone who touched the grass. if a potential escapee made it past the grass, they then faced a trench, a series of four trip wires, and finally the barbed wire fence capped with razor wire

Because the administrative paperwork holds no record of the crematorium at Dachau ever being used, Neo-Nazi's claim that the after the liberation of the camp the U.S. Army murdered thousands of Jews and burned them then used this as false evidence to convict German officers accused of war crimes.



one of the three ovens in the Dachau crematorium

After Dachau, we headed back to Munich to pick up our belongings and catch our train to Berne with a connection through Zurich, but after riding what we thought was our train for an hour, we realized that we had taken a commuter train straight north from Munich. After figuring out a gameplan, we caught a trian to Zurich where we ended up spending the night before finishing the trip to Berne the following morning.



a monument built to remember those who suffered at Dachau