We had a great private guide for Munich and Dachau!

We really enjoyed touring Munich and Regensburg with Taff and his tour of Dachau was so emotional and well done. He really knows his stuff. He has met with so many veterans as well as survivors and has 1st hand knowledge that he shares with his tours. Certainly money well spent.

Thanks for sharing your experience. If we get back to Munich I will certainly look into his tours.

You only gave an email address for the tour. Do they have a website? Any way to check out the service and price in advance of emailing them? Most tours to this.

I read on the forum all the time that “It’s so easy to get to Dachau”

It really is easy, and it's so very much less expensive than taking a tour. Taking a cost-added tour just to avoid figuring out how to do it yourself is a cop-out.

You say you took the U-Bahn to the Hbf (and assuming return the same way), 5 single ticket each way (10 x 1,90€ tickets) from elsewhere in the central zone of Munich to the Hbf would have cost 19€. Assuming you knew enough to buy a group ticket, it would have still cost 17€.
A group ticket from the central zone to KZ-Gedenkstätte Dachau (the Memorial) would have cost 18,40€, 1,40€ more than you already paid to get to the Hbf. If you had paid for 5 adult tours (@ 4€ ea) of the Memorial, led by one of the Memorial's own trained guide, the total cost (for 5 people), trans and tour would have been 21,40€ (That's 4.28€ per person). How much did you pay for the tour? Convenience has its price!

Wow Lee, talk about dumping on Valerie. Why are you so rude to people who have gone on a great tour and then write a review about it. She thought the tour was great, so leave her alone. Just because you have not gone on a great tour doesn't give you permission to say they are all a waste of money.

You go, Ms. Jo!

Sometimes it is not about money, but value. The value of a good guide can make a huge difference.

LOL, thanks to you all:) No worries about Lee - I’ve been on the forum long enough to know he/she doesn’t like private tours to Dachau and that’s all good with me! Lee and I can have different opinions;)

We paid Taff 300 Euros for the entire day. We were with him for 9am to 6:30 pm.

We started with a private walking tour that lasted 3.5 hours. We strolled Munich, stopping at the pivotal sites in regards to the development of the Nazi power. Early afternoon, we headed out to Dachau.

Taff was going to start with Dachau that day and end with the city walking tour, but another guide had contacted him to say that Dachau was EXTREMELY crowded that morning and so Taff switched our day around.

We spent about 3 hours out at Dachau with Taff and headed back to town. I think he was willing to then sit down with us at a beer house and share even more info but we are not drinkers and we were pretty wiped out so we headed back to our hotel.

I spend a couple of months a year in Europe. Do I have the skills to figure out how to get from my hotel to Dachau by tram, train and then bus? Sure. Do I enjoy letting someone else figure it out for me sometimes? Yep:)

As a group of 5, we paid 60 Euros each for the 9 hour touring day. Taff paid for our public transit costs out of that money.

Lee put a lot of math into his/her post but I think the per person total was 21 Euros. For 39 additional Euros each, we got an additional 4 hours of private touring through Munich and learned a ton about post-Marshall Plan life there and a fool-proof escort out to Dachau.

I STILL recommend Taff:) His website is not working - he’s in the middle of trying to design a new, low-cost one. You can email him and find him on Facebook.

As a Munich local who went through this terrible history lesson at school, who knows the important NS buildings, who of course visited Dachau and had a grandmother who lived in Munich during the NS period, I'm saying it is better to do this with a guide.

Dachau and the NS Documentation Center are easy to visit without a guide because you can get all the important information there. However, I think it is essential to know beforehand (I would always visit Dachau at the very end) how this could have happend.

I was lucky to have a grandmother who didn't keep silent and who told me a lot. But even if you don't have that, school teachers are there to help when this topic is covered in history class. All by yourself (regardless of whether you are a Munich resident or a tourist) you do not understand how this slowly creeping horror could become such a devastating episode in human history.

And you also don't understand that today we are always on the verge of behaving exactly like this again ... I'm talking about many countries and not only Germany.

Still many Munich residents (or tourists) go to important places to commemorate those who resisted. Whenever I can, for example, I put a white rose under a bust in the main building of the Ludwig-Maximilians-University. There they commemorate (hopefully Taff mentioned that) the members of the 'White Rose Movement' (a resistance group consisting of young university students and a professor).
Even today I prefer to walk down Viscardigasse behind the Feldherrnhalle (Field Marshal's Hall) instead of crossing Odeonsplatz in front of the Feldherrnhalle. I think of my grandmother what she told me about it when I walk this alley. Certainly Taff also spoke about this form of silent protest by the people of Munich against the NS regime.

I think Taff may be working on his website. Sometimes it takes a while to get a new website designed, and up and running. It took me a few weeks last year too.

You can read about his tours on Trip Advisor if you like.
https://www.tripadvisor.co.uk/Attraction_Review-g187309-d2013770-Reviews-Dark_History_Tours-Munich_Upper_Bavaria_Bavaria.html