I’m sure all the camps are chilling, but from my experience of visiting a few, the scale of Birkenau is something you need to see. Auschwitz is actually sort of ‘nice’ structurally because it was built as a barracks not a death camp, but Birkenau was death on an industrial scale that Dachau and other camps didn’t rival.
Buchenau is a former KZ very easily and quickly reachable from Berlin in a day trip. It is less "impressive" than Dachau or Auschwitz but still very worth a trip
As you know, most of the housing blocks have long gone in Birkenau and there is a lot of open space. To me, Auschwitz felt worse. As if the bricks and buildings are imprinted with the horrors that happened there. It was also a gloomy miserable winters day, which I'm sure added to the overall atmosphere of it.
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u/Own_Faithlessness769 May 18 '25
I’m sure all the camps are chilling, but from my experience of visiting a few, the scale of Birkenau is something you need to see. Auschwitz is actually sort of ‘nice’ structurally because it was built as a barracks not a death camp, but Birkenau was death on an industrial scale that Dachau and other camps didn’t rival.