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Dachau concentration camp

Dachau concentration camp

8.6
A Nazi camp near Munich where the government locked up and killed Jews and other people during the Holocaust
  • proper noun
translation icon : campo de concentración de Dachau
  • You can find those very words at Germany's notorious Dachau concentration camp.

Examples

  • An Army doctor helped free the Dachau concentration camp in 1945, meticulously documenting his experiences in letters home to his wife.

  • Martin Niemoller, a German pastor who fell out of favor with Adolf Hitler and was imprisoned at the Dachau concentration camp for several years, wrote

    Blog text (33)
  • As a Holocaust survivor who spent years in the Dachau concentration camp, I know because I lived it.

Synonyms

Dachau
vsDachau concentration camp
9 9.5

A Nazi concentration camp near Munich where many people were held and killed

uses the full descriptive name to mark it as the official camp name

Surface Forms

Morphology

Dachau + concentration + camp

The phrase is largely compositional: it names a concentration camp located in Dachau, so a learner who knows the constituents can infer it refers to a particular type of prisoner camp at that place. However, the full historical and ideological significance (that it was a Nazi camp used in the Holocaust) is not recoverable from the words alone and requires background knowledge, so the expression is not fully transparent.

Etymology

Dachau concentration camp is named after the nearby town of Dachau, where the camp was built in 1933. The Nazis used the camp to lock up and kill many Jews and other people, so today the name stands for that terrible part of history.