Touring the Horrible: A Guide to Germany's Darkest Places

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The list of Nazi concentration and death camps is long and harrowing: Auschwitz, Bergen-Belsen, Treblinka, Majdanek, Buchenwald. There are dozens more.

But for all of them, there was a model. And that model was Dachau. Opened in March 1933, just weeks after Adolf Hitler took power and in the wave of political arrests that took place after the Reichstag fire in Berlin, the camp is located at a former World War I munitions factory on the outskirts of the town of Dachau, not far from Munich.

At first, the prisoners were mostly those from the left side of the political spectrum: Social Democrats, Communists and others who objected too strenuously to Nazi policies. It was only in 1938, following the Night of the Broken Glass, that large numbers of Munich's Jews were incarcerated at Dachau, prompting an enlargement of the camp.

In all, during the camp's 12 years of existence, some 200,000 prisoners from all over Europe were locked up in Dachau. It also served as a training center for SS concentration camp guards and they were schooled in the brutality necessary to run Nazi Germany's camp system.

Though mass gassings did not take place at Dachau, some 41,500 people lost their lives within its walls, including thousands of Soviet prisoners of war shot to death just outside the camp gates. Advancing American troops liberated the camp on April 29, 1945.

Today, the memorial includes an extensive museum documenting the degradations of life in Dachau and the horrors of the Holocaust. Behind the exhibition hall, in what used to be the camp's administration building, is the low structure housing the isolation cells, one of which was occupied by would-be Hitler assassin Georg Elser.

In addition, visitors can wander through the camp grounds, where the foundations of the barracks remain, including notorious Block 5 where Nazi "doctors" carried out medical experiments on prisoners. Beyond the barracks lies the crematorium -- and the gas chamber, which was most likely never used.

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• Part 1: A Guide to Germany's Darkest Places
• Part 2: Wewelsburg -- Himmler's Cult Site
• Part 3: Point Alpha -- Cold War Frontier
• Part 4: Nazi Party Rally Grounds in Nuremberg
• Part 5: Wannsee Conference House -- Home to the Final Solution
• Part 6: Hanover's House of Horror
• Part 7: The Last Submarine -- U-995 in Laboe
• Part 8: Berlin Wall Documentation Center
• Part 9: Dachau Concentration Camp
• Part 10: Terror Strikes the Munich Olympics
• Part 11: From Death Strip to Green Strip