Family, friends and former prisoners of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau gathered in the Amsterdammse Bos, a large park and wooded area just outside of the Dutch capital, to commemorate the 65th anniversary of camp’s liberation.
The annual event commemorates the liberation of the camp by the US 7th Army on 29 April 1945. The parade was led by a number of survivors of the concentration camp.
People walked along a 60 metre-long avenue of hedges, past plaques naming the 500 concentration camps set up by the Nazis in Germany and throughout the countries they occupied. People placed flowers in the hedges to commemorate all the people who died in Dachau.
In her speech, Dutch Institute for War Documentation director Marjan Schwegman said , “this ritual is a special way for each and every one of us to realise that the camps were a horrific reality”.
Although historians cannot be sure of the total number of people killed in Dachau and its sub camps because the Nazis destroyed a large number of the records, an estimated 200,000 people died in Dachau along with about 10,000 in the various satellite camps.
