Merkel to become first German leader to visit Dachau

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will visit Dachau next Tuesday, making her Berlin’s first leader to travel to the former Nazi concentration camp.

Merkel will lay a wreath at the site’s memorial, make a short speech, and will tour the camp, AFP reported, citing Merkel’s spokesperson.

Merkel will be joined on her visit by Holocaust survivor Max Mannheimer, director of the site, and by Bavaria’s education minister.

In 1992, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl turned down a request to visit the concentration camp, angering Jewish and Israeli groups. Seven years earlier, US President Ronald Reagan also refused to visit, saying that he and Kohl both agreed that it was unnecessary.

“They have a feeling, a guilt feeling that’s been imposed upon them, and I just think it’s unnecessary,” Reagan said then, according to a 1985 LA Times article. Reagan added that there are “very few alive that remember even the war, and certainly none of them who were adults and participating in any way.”

About 16 km from the Bavarian city of Munich, Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp to open in Germany itself. In operation from 1933-1945, Dachau served as a template for other concentration camps operated by the Third Reich. It primarily housed various political prisoners, criminals, Catholics and Jews.

While not a death camp like Auschwitz, the mostly prisoners were worked mercilessly and many died there. Nazi records show some 31,000 official deaths during the years that the work camp was operational, but the total number of prisoner deaths are unknown. About one third of the prisoners were Jews.

Jewish former French Prime Minister Leon Blum was briefly imprisoned at Dachau, as were former Bank of Israel Governor Moshe Sanbar and noted psychologist Viktor Frankl.

The US Army liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945, after prisoners had taken control of the camp.

Gavriel Fiske contributed to this report.