Visitors to Dachau enter the Baracke X building, shown in the first photo above, through a door on the south side of the building, and proceed through the waiting room, and then into the undressing room before entering the gas chamber. On the wall of the undressing room is a sign which tells visitors the following:
Begin quote from the sign
This is the center of potential mass murder. The room was disguised as “showers” and equipped with fake shower spouts to mislead the victims and prevent them from refusing to enter the room. During a period of 15 to 20 minutes up to 150 at a time could be suffocated to death through prussic acid poison gas (Zyklon B).
End quote from the sign
The second photo above shows three empty holes on the ceiling of the alleged gas chamber, where shower heads had been before they were stolen by tourists as souvenirs. Just below the ceiling of the Dachau gas chamber are two light fixture boxes [not shown], which were claimed, in a film shown at the Nuremberg IMT, to be the “top vents” for introducing the poison gas into the gas chamber.
Information given to tourists about the gas chamber at Dachau varies according to the person who is guiding the tour. Some guides tell visitors that the gas chamber was never used, while others maintain that the gas chamber was used a few times. If the gas chamber was never used, why was it built? Some of the guides say that it was used to train SS men in how to use a gas chamber.
A recent visitor who took a tour of Dachau wrote the following on her blog:
Begin quote from blog post:
Interestingly enough, Dachau was never considered an extermination camp. Hitler made sure that none of these camps resided in Germany. He wanted them to be in the countries that he occupied so it would be easier to transport the foreign people to them. So, knowing this, many wonder why Dachau had a gas chamber in it. The most popular theory is that since Dachau was one of the first concentration camps, it acted as a model for others. When Germans were trained to work in concentration camps, they were trained to use gas chambers, and some were trained at Dachau.
Some guides say that the gas came through fake shower heads, but others tell visitors that gas pellets were poured onto the floor through the two screened openings on the east wall of the gas chamber.
All but one of the shower heads has been stolen by visitors as souvenirs and at least one guide tells tourists that the gas pellets were dropped through the holes in the ceiling. Three of the holes for the shower heads are shown in the second photo above.
Although anyone can look up into the holes where the shower heads used to be and see that there are no pipes of any kind there, one tour guide told a visitor on September 24, 2008 that there were special plumbing pipes that brought the gas through the shower heads. It has been known for at least sixty years that the Zyklon-B gas that was allegedly used at Dachau was in the form of pellets the size of peas, and could not have come through the small holes in the shower heads.