Dachau is a lovely town.

The S-Bahn train zips folks between Munich and Dachau with hardly a hiccup, dropping you neatly near the center of this bedroom community and suburb of metropolitan Munich. Several buses converge on Dachau's train station to carry commuters back to their respective neighborhoods.

But the biggest and most crowded bus sitting in the ring is number 726, marked "Gedenkstätte."

“Gedenkstätte” is German for “Memorial Site.” "Why," you may ask, "are they not more specific?" I am standing in Dachau. To what else could they possibly refer?

Bus 726 winds its way through the town, but even though it makes occasional stops, very few passengers either step aboard or disembark. After about a 12-minutes journey, the bus arrives at a groomed, wooded park with a visitors’ center. Here the bus empties almost completely. Down the curved lane, shielded by trees from the road, lies the entrance to the first Nazi* concentration camp, the site where they developed and refined their rituals of humiliation, terror, and death.

A concrete bridge carries visitors over the moat-ish creek that runs around the camp's perimeter. The guardhouse has been rebuilt, along with the iron gate that cynically greeted new inmates with the phrase, “ARBEIT MACHT FREI” (work will make you free).

Dachau was a place for political prisoners, religious protesters, and after the war began, prisoners of war. The relatively few Jews who were sent to the Dachau camp were soon transported to the death camps. Late in the war, when their slave labor was needed to help manufacturing for the war effort, Jews returned to Dachau and its satellite camps.

The camp today is not configured exactly as it was during Third Reich. Following the war and through the 1950s, the camp was put to different use, including as a prison for those who had run the concentration camp. Many of the buildings, which were ramshackle from the start, were necessarily torn down.

A memorial site was established early on, but it was initially limited to the two crematoria (which survived) and the land surrounding, where the ashes of the dead had been heaved into pits.

Survivors, however, wanted a more substantial memorial, one that would help document the horrors that occurred throughout the camp. Therefore the walls and barbed wire fence, the watch towers, and two of the more than 20 barracks were reconstructed and the entire camp was configured as a memorial. And life in the camp was not static. The barracks are furnished in ways that show the deteriorating conditions at the camp between its first use in 1933 and its last days in 1945.

So now when you enter the grounds, the largest building, which was built as a maintenance building, kitchen, showers, etc., has now been converted to an extensive museum. Touring the exhibits is far from easy. The stories, pictures, and newsreel footage document the arbitrary injustice, stark cruelty (detainees were used as human guinea pigs in medical experiments), and death, made most jarring by the large, haphazard piles of emaciated, naked human bodies awaiting cremation.

When the number of deaths within the camp began to climb, the second crematorium was built. The S.S. had a gas chamber built within the new building, and included the now familiar fake sign indicating it was "showers." In spite of the gas chamber's presence, however, there are no mass murders documented here, as there were in the death camps. Some survivors, however, have said there were small groups or individuals killed in the gas chamber, presumably to test its effectiveness.

But even though it was not technically operated as a death camp, at least 32,000 prisoners are known to have died in Dachau, most due to disease. Nonetheless, enormous numbers were murdered without trial. Within the camp's fences, death was everywhere.

In the rear of the camp sit 4 religious memorials: A Jewish one, a Roman Catholic one, a Protestant one (the largest), and a relatively new Russian Orthodox chapel. (Many Russian prisoners of war were shot here, but for an unexplained reason, they were not included in the accounting of the dead.) The need for separate worship sites shows that Dachau still is cleaved with conflict.

My day here was marked by the most dreary weather of my vacation. It could not have been more appropriate.

I can still say that Dachau is a lovely town. However, through rhetoric and propaganda Hitler and the Nazis convinced the populace here and elsewhere that their lifestyle was at grave risk. And when a population is afraid, it is difficult to remain a lovely people.

And what happened here and similar sites is exceedingly ugly.

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*I have noticed that, when memorials in France and in The Netherlands discuss the atrocities of World War II, they tend to refer to the perpetrators as “the Nazis.” It is as if they are trying to draw a line between the German troops who invaded their lands and the present-day German people.

However, here in Germany, such distinctions are absent. All the memorials in Germany for those who were slaughtered or imprisoned refer not to the Nazi perpetrators, but instead to the Germans. “The Germans” systematically sought to annihilate the Jews. “The Germans” euthanized the retarded and the mentally ill. “The Germans” used concentration camp prisoners as slave labor in the war effort.

The effect is to hammer home the national responsibility. Indeed, all German school children are required to visit a concentration camp with their class. They deserve some credit for consistent effort. (When was the last time you read that “The Americans” enslaved, beat, and sold Africans simply to bolster their own economy?)