WWII Photos - Dachau

Small auction house had a two assortments of photos of a WWII vet in Europe. One lot had some tank photos but didn’t go as hard after it b/c I like planes better. Though I didn’t want to split up the lot, I went after the one with the field of p51s and 109 and called it a day.

Just opened them up and to my surprise was a photo of the sign that the US put up at Dachau, pretty interesting. Flipped through a few more and found a photo of the crematorium. Really wish I had fought harder to get the second batch now, who knows what was in it.

Strange wording on that sign.

frankie said:

Strange wording on that sign.

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I think it was an unfortunate typo - found this picture from the holocaust museums website and the “don’t” looks like it was squeezed in there. Guessing this was prior to the correction. Some photos are dated, most are 43-44.

Very cool picture of a late bf 109 k

They did a pretty good job of not touching them. The crematoria look pretty much exactly like that today.

Cyrano4747 said:

They did a pretty good job of not touching them. The crematoria look pretty much exactly like that today.

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Interesting - I actually found one more picture of the crematoria in there as well. Reached out to the holocaust museum to see if they would like the photos (donate) but haven’t heard back.

fishermankw said:

Interesting - I actually found one more picture of the crematoria in there as well. Reached out to the holocaust museum to see if they would like the photos (donate) but haven’t heard back.

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Who did you contact? Usually they respond relatively quickly. edit: assuming you're talking about the USHMM

Cyrano4747 said:

Who did you contact? Usually they respond relatively quickly. edit: assuming you're talking about the USHMM

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Correct - reached out earlier in the week. Reached out to another small museum as well.

fishermankw said:

Correct - reached out earlier in the week. Reached out to another small museum as well.

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Email curator@ushmm.org or call them directly at 202.382.0220. They specifically call out liberation photos as something they're interested in. They'll ask you to send them a picture of the photos (front and back) so they can determine if they want them, and then proceed from there.

I'd be a bit surprised if they don't want these, especially if you point out that it shows the sign before the grammatical fix was made that you can see on another photo that they already have accessible. That's the kind of pairing they tend to appreciate.

I recognize those ovens… a sad place indeed.

Interesting.

As many people here know, my mother and her family lived in the former Dachau KZ after WW2, when the prisoner barracks were converted into housing for "displaced persons" who had fled or been driven out of the former German provinces in the east or other countries with significant ethnic German populations.

I had a small collection of items from Dachau that another member of this forum now has as a memorial to the victims of the concentration camps - an SS helmet, SS rune and totenkopf marked soup spoon, and piece of original barbed wire. I also have a badly rusted fork that I dug up in the same place where I found the spoon, and a U.S. Army map of the entire Dachau complex back when it was "Camp Dachau" and the former SS training grounds were the U.S. Army's "Riverside Golf Course" - the river being the Amper that runs through the area. When I find which box the fork and map are in, I will also be sending them to him.

If the museum isn't interested in these Dachau photos, maybe the member here would like to have them to add to his little personal memorial.