Dachau - option to pass on this?

It looks like this tour stops at the camp on a travel day between Lauterbrunnen and Munich. As such, unless you seek out alternative transportation there may be limited options for completely avoiding the camp. You can certainly opt out and stay with the bus or nearby. I would suggest discussing this with your guide a few days before. S/he may be able to come up with options for you.

It’s a heavy sad topic and location. No need to feel selfish about it.

Thank you, Rocket. :)

Dachau isn't just a concentration camp - it's a town too. You could visit the palace on your own there.

https://www.schloesser.bayern.de/englisch/palace/objects/dachau.htm

There's an art gallery as well.

https://www.dachauer-galerien-museen.de/index.php/en/

Dachau town website: https://www.dachau.de/en/tourism.html

Dachau is a walkable town. I imagine you could leave your bag on the bus and get dropped somewhere, then later take the S2 train from Dachau station into Munich (25 minutes) at the proper time to meet your bus group at the hotel. There is constant train service throughout the day the Dachau train station and Munich.

I honestly don't understand why tours do not automatically provide some sort of alternative to the gruesome experience of a concentration camp visit.

It’s a heavy sad topic and location. No need to feel selfish about it.

I agree; I don't see this as being rude or selfish at all.

I would email the tour guide or Rick Steves about this. I will just add that I knew a person who thought they'd be a crying mess after touring Dachau but she felt fine surprising herself, mostly due to how unlike Auschwitz, the original buildings were mostly torn down and there's really not much a feel of a "camp".
KZ's are free so perhaps you could walk or take a bus into the city if you still feel that way when you arrive. I really do think it's important to see things like this but YVMV and I'm sure the tour guide has dealt with this before and will have some suggestions.

PS I'm sure you'll enjoy your time in Europe with a Rick Steves tour!

I'd just get off the bus, walk over to the train station, and get on the next train to Munich. Check in early at the hotel or just walk into the city from the main train station. Tell the tour guide you'll meet them somewhere and bypass the place.

I've been to Dachau several times. I usually want a drink afterwords.

You'll not be able to email your tour guide as suggested in a prior post BUT I would talk with them privately before you get to this transit day. I'm sure this comes up all the time and they will have suggestions for you and they might even mention it in the welcome talk. The visit there is a limited time (maybe 2 hours?) so to me it wouldn't be worth it to try and get public transportation in to Munich.

I have been on a 21 BOE trip. I thought it would be very emotional to me but it is stressed that this is a memorial to those that died there.

There is also a cafeteria in the Visitor Center where you could have refreshment while waiting on the rest of the group.

I think Pam has given you the best answer.

I went with my 20 year old daughter a few years ago. If I remember correctly, you can just walk around the grounds or you can visit the exhibits. Looking at the schedule, you are on the bus 7 hours that day, so I can't imagine the stop would be very long.

It was interesting for us as her grandfather had been in one of the liberating divisions from the US Army, and we had heard much about his two year time in Europe during WWII.

No, it is not considered rude or selfish. Each person decides for himself/herself to go and see a camp. I know women who hold it very important to see the camps (one or more) and, conversely, I know women who feel seeing the horror is too great for them and refuse to see one. It is an individual and personal decision.

Dachau is no where near as chilling as Auschwitz, in Poland. We visited Auschwitz and my wife had nightmares for some time. You don't have to go, but I suggest that you do visit. It will help you understand how evil the Holocaust was.

Thanks everyone for your responses! I'm glad to know I have options.

We had people who did not want to visit the camp at Mauthausen, which was an interim stop on the bus ride to Vienna. I believe they stayed and waited in the visitor center, as did the coach driver. No big deal. Dachau would be easier to skip, as Russ said, it is right in the middle of town.

"I'm glad to know I have options." Absolutely, a personal decision. You have the option to pass.

I have been to both Auschwitz and Dachau and was more upset by Dachau as you can go into the buildings with the actual krematoria (and yes, there were morons who thought it amusing to put their heads in the ovens and have photos taken) and staging rooms...that part really stayed with me for a very long time. I'm not sorry I went as this is an era in history that I have studied for many years, but you are wise to realize it's not for you. The town of Dachau itself looked charming and could keep you entertained for a couple of hours if need be.

Feel free to skip any activity on a RS tour. Just make sure you tell your guide and your buddy first. Remember that this is your vacation and you can do whatever you want.

I've been on three RS tours now (two guided tours and one My Way tour) and I can remember several times when someone skipped an activity. I skipped a guided tour of a church because I was just tired of churches that day.

stacy,

As the others have said, you can certainly skip the Dachau portion of the tour. Many activities on tours are optional. If you don't want to take a particular walking tour, visit a museum, gallery or whatever, just tell the guide and do your own thing. I'd suggest mentioning your preferences on the Dachau tour to your guide at the introductory meeting on the first night of the tour.

I agree with a previous suggestion to simply take the train into Munich. It's only about a 22 minute direct trip from Dachau to Munich Hbf via S-Bahn, so very easy. Leave your main luggage on the Bus and collect it when the group arrives. You'll know which hotel you'll be using in Munich, and the guide may be able to give you your room assignment so that you can go directly to the hotel.

You may have already seen this, but these are some of the incredible sights you'll be seeing and experiencing - https://youtu.be/bIieNmQQBWc . Start getting your packing list organized!

You'll figure it out while on the tour. There may be others in the group who feel the same, and you can join them. The RS tour leaders have undoubtedly dealt with this before.

If I remember correctly, the stop is only a couple hours at most. I stayed on the bus due to injuring myself earlier in the day and didn't feel like walking much.

I don't think opting to take alternative transport to the hotel would work out. You would have to either get all of your luggage off the bus when it stops and drag it with you the rest of the day, or meet the bus at the hotel stop at the exact time it arrives (remember, on the tour you are responsible for your luggage).

Signed up for BOE 14 days Oct. 2019. I had the same question myself. So glad you asked and now I know I can opt out if wanted, Just staying in the visitor center is fine with me. Thanks everyone.

This is one of the reasons I've never considered certain tours. We lost family in the camps during WWII. This was before I was born. BUT I've heard enough first hand stories based on relatives who were THERE and survived that I do not think I'm ready to see the camps.

For those people who wish to see them - I have no complaint. It's just not something I can do, based on my family's history. And it's a reason I don't even look at certain tours.

Long story short - you are not alone.

Agree that the camp can be overwhelming -- I visited with someone whose father had been imprisoned at Dachau, and it was a sobering experience. Didn't feel like talking for an hour or two afterwards. (And the father HAD survived.)

However, I would not have traded those hours at Dachau for the same amount of time at the Hofbrauhaus. Only you can know what's best for you.

I am 66. When I was 5-10, we lived in Germany. My parents took us to Dachau when I was 8. I was not terrified, damaged, or bothered by this. As a child, I became interested in understanding how this could happen.

When we took our children to Europe in 2011, we visited Mauthausen near Linz, Austria. It was a "work camp", although thousands were killed. Again, it shows the mechanisms.

I won't tell you what to do. These things happened, and they were terrible. Does seeing where they happened help in understanding them? Only each person can answer that question.

I was born during the war and grew up in the years right after. I was heavily indoctrinated about the concentration camps (one of the history teachers at my HS had been with the troops liberating one of the camps), although no one bothered to tell me that they were not all "death camps".

When I finally visited Dachau, I was actually relieved to find that it was not one of the death camps - it was a work camp. True, the work camps were not a summer camp. They were brutal, and many people died from overwork. Many others were killed for refusing to work. But overall, over 80% of the people who went into Dachau survived.

So, if you already know about the brutality of the camps in general, seeing Dachau should not be an overwhelming experience. I would suggest you go there.

If you don't want to do the Dachau tour, there is a bus from the Memorial to the Bahnhof and an S-Bahn from there to downtown Munich. Or maybe the RS bus driver will drop you off at the station. In either case, it can give you a jump on checking in and seeing Munich.

Relieved? To find out people were worked to death?

There was premeditated murder at Dachau right from the start - read "Hitler's First Victims" by Timothy W Ryback.

Dachau itself has a nice enough centre and a couple of parks. Take a long lunch followed by a walkabout. If your tour bus stops at the memorial only, it's a short taxi ride (bus?) into town.

I really hope that this thread does not descend into a complaint about words used to describe our reactions, as contemporary people, at the camps. The WWII Final Solution was a terrible thing. Words are poor things in expressing how bad the camps were.

I think that they are worth visiting:

1) We must never forget. The generation who lived through the camps is dying. Only those who were small children in camps are left. In 10 years, only a few will be left.
2) There were stories of great human success in camps. Some survived by doing good. We must not forget those either.
3) Not all camps were run by the Nazis. My relatives, who were auslander-Deutsch in Yugoslavia, spent time in some of the camps after the war. This was a program run the US Government ("Orderly and humane: The Expulsion of the Germans after the Second World War" R.M. Douglas). They were not in the camps as death camps, but simply because they had been expelled from the East, and were put in some of the camps after WWII using the housing there. 11,000,000-12,000,000 Germanic peoples from Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, and Bulgaria were sent back to Germany and Austria.

Yes it is horrific that 32,000 lost their lives there. I don't blame anyone not wanting to go, especially if it is the reason expressed by the OP. At the battle of Tannenberg in 1914 the Russians lost 50,000 in killed alone in the course of three days.

You could wait in the cafeteria while your husband walks through the concentration camp. Then you don’t need to worry about logistics meeting back up with the rest of your group.

The website for the Dachau KZ says that 41,500 were murdered out of an approximate 200,000.
https://www.kz-gedenkstaette-dachau.de/

Thanks for the statistic...good to know. I knew it was around the figure of killed, here ca 10, 000 fewer, on the part of the Russians at Tannenberg.

I get my information on the Falaise pocket regarding German losses from the books by Max Hastings, Dennis Showalter, R. Hargreaves, J. Keegan, A. Beevor (for the most recent literature on the topic), and others.

Yes, the usually given and accepted figures of the Falaise cauldron is German dead stood at 10,000, prisoners taken at 50,000, and anywhere from 20,000 to maybe 40,000 escaped.