The gate at the Dachau concentration camp is infamous for a couple of reasons.
One is that Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp. The other is its gate, where prisoners were greeted with the words “Arbeit macht frei”, or “Work will make you free”.
Here’s how it looks at the moment:
Someone stole the "Arbeit macht frei" gate at the Dachau concentration camp @BILDhttp://t.co/ACb7PTrY7Rpic.twitter.com/8v7y3mf8Vr
— Ken Olsen LATimes (@KenGOlsen) November 2, 2014Somebody has stolen the entire gate, which is made of wrought iron and measures 190cm by 95cm.
Not surprisingly, the theft has horrified pretty much everyone, especially Dachau memorial director Gabriele Hammermann who told news agency DPA that gate is “the central symbol for the prisoners’ ordeal”.
The camp was set up in 1933 and more than 40,000 of its 200,000 prisoners died there before it was liberated by US forces in 1945.
Security guards noticed the gate was missing yesterday morning and said the thief would have had to climb over another gate to get to it.
The memorial deliberately decided against surveillance as it as it didn’t want to turn it into a “maximum-security unit”.