Dachau was established in March 1933 and was the first regular concentration camp set up by the Nazis. It is about 10 miles northwest of Munich on the site of an empty World War I munitions factory and is directly adjacent to the provincial village of Dachau. It was the model for the thousands of other camps set up by the Germans including its organizational structure and operational procedures, officer/guard training, and medical experimentation.

Its original capacity was to be 5,000 prisoners and the first internees were political prisoners (Communists and Social Democrats). Later, 'enemies' of the Third Reich such as Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, dissident Christian clergy, and Jehovah's Witnesses were sent to Dachau as well. After Kristallnacht more than 10,000 Jews were briefly interned there although most were released within a few months upon their promise to leave Germany with their families.

In 1937 and 1938 the camp was rebuilt to house a much larger population as well as a large contingent of SS guards, for which Dachau was a major training facility. Eventually 36 subsidiary camps were set up with Dachau as the nucleus in which some 37,000 prisoners worked in the armaments and aircraft industry and machine shops. One of these sub-camps was Kaufering.

Of the 206,000 prisoners who were formally registered in Dachau before its liberation on April 29, 1945, there were 31,500 registered deaths from starvation, medical experimentation, overwork, disease, and from the brutal punishments that were inflicted for the slightest infractions (such as a missing button and coughing during roll call); 80 to 90 percent of whom were probably Jews. However, this number does not take into account the thousands who died in the final death marches as the Allies neared the camp, some 3,500 sick prisoners who were taken to Hartheim Castle in Linz (Austria) to be executed, or an unknown number of Russian prisoners of war who were executed by shooting.

In Dachau there had always been a cremation facility: a first it was a wooden hut with one oven but in 1942 as the death toll climbed a newer brick facility was built. This crematorium (designated 'Building X') had an additional four rooms that were used as delousing chambers for disinfecting clothing and bedding. A fifth room, with a morgue attached, was equipped with false showerheads and openings in the walls through which Zyklon-B pellets could be poured. It appears that the homicidal gas chamber was never used in any systematic way, except perhaps on a restricted experimental basis. The bodies of those who were not cremated (almost 6,000) were buried in a mass grave in Leitenberg, a few kilometers away from Dachau.

In Dachau, as at Auschwitz, pseudo-scientific medical experiments were conducted in which prisoners were used as guinea pigs in high-altitude and hypothermia (freezing) experiments, research on controlling tuberculosis and malaria, and pharmaceutical experiments to stop bleeding, and in making sea water drinkable. Prisoners also performed forced labor: building roads, working in gravel pits, removing snow, and draining marshes. There were also factories in the camp in which inmates produced bicycle parts, baked goods, religious objects, porcelain, electrical components, clothing, and furniture.

In the final days of the war, the already appalling conditions at Dachau, worsened. Barracks designed for 200 prisoners housed over 1,600 prisoners each. Hundreds of people died on a daily basis, most from a typhus epidemic that raged unchecked. On April 26, 1945 there were 67,665 registered prisoners in Dachau, among them 22,100 Jews. Seven thousand prisoners were marched out of the camp in the final days before liberation during which time they died from hunger, cold, and exhaustion in large numbers. The Germans planned to murder the remaining prisoners in the camp in an operation named Wolkenbrand (Firecloud) with poison, but the quick advance of the allies prevented it.

On April 29, 1945 the camp was liberated by the Seventh Army of the United States armed forces. Many prisoners died after liberation from typhus and from the irreversible effects of starvation and cold. Forty members of the camp's SS staff were tried by an American court at Dachau in late 1945. Of the forty accused, thirty-six were sentenced to death.

Today Dachau is an education and memorial center that is visited by 500,000 persons a year.