Memorial Dachau

Assisted by a commission of survivors, the architects Louis Duco and François Spy worked in 1985 on a construction that could resemble a small memorial temple. Two brutal and cold granite columns support a triangle of red marble with the name of the camp, a direct reference to the embroidery sewn on the pajamas of the deportees. Below the tip of the triangle is a small black coffin containing ashes from the Dachau crematorium. The visitor will not see this box until he climbs the seven steps that lead to the monument.
A sentence by the poet Edmond Michelet, who was also deported to this camp, runs across the wall: "Nous avons sondé des abîmes en nous mêmes et chez les autres - We have explored abysses in ourselves and in others." The memorial was unveiled on June 1, 1985, 40 years after the liberation of the camp.

When the southern German Dachau camp, right above the Bavarian city of Munich, was liberated on April 29, 1945, around 100,000 people were murdered and more than 200,000 were held captive. Dachau was set up in 1933 after Hitler's takeover of power, making it the first concentration camp of the Nazis and a training camp for the executioners who were later given command of the later concentration camps.

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