Legacies of Dachau: The Uses and Abuses of a Concentration Camp, 1933–2001

Auschwitz, Belsen, Dachau. These names still evoke the horrors of Nazi Germany around the world. This book takes one of these sites, Dachau, and traces its history from the beginning of the twentieth century, through its twelve years as Nazi Germany’s premier concentration camp, to the camp’s postwar uses as prison, residential neighborhood, and, finally, museum and memorial site. With superbly chosen examples and an eye for telling detail, Legacies of Dachau documents how Nazi perpetrators were quietly rehabilitated to become powerful elites, while survivors of the concentration camps were once again marginalized, criminalized and silenced. Combining meticulous archival research with an encyclopedic knowledge of the extensive literatures on Germany, the Holocaust, and historical memory, Marcuse unravels the intriguing relationship between historical events, individual memory, and political culture, to offer a unified interpretation of their interaction from the Nazi era to the twenty-first century.

• Shows by using the example of the horrific Dachau concentration camp how experience of the past affects the present • Offers an overview of the history of West Germany, 1945 to the present day, through the changing perceptions of the Nazi atrocities • Includes a rich array of photographs and maps of the Dachau concentration camp memorial site.