Dachau opens

March 22, 1933

In an old munitions factory near Munich, Heinrich Himmler's SS set up a camp for political prisoners, communists and Social Democrats first, then Jews, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals, Roma. It was the prototype, the template for what was to come. Over the next twelve years hundreds of camps would metastasize across Europe, swallowing millions of lives in an industrial machinery of death.