Dachau Art Gallery

Right next to the Office of Cultural Affairs is a beautiful two-story building known as the Ziegler villa. This building, which now houses the Dachau Art Gallery upstairs over a bank, is located at Konrad-Adenauer-Strasse 3, across the street from the Zieglerbräu Brewery and Inn. The Ziegler family came into possession of the building by inheritance in 1856. It was sold to the town council by the Ziegler family in 1933 and the town hall was temporarily located here while a new town hall was being built to replace the old one next to the Zieglerbräu Brewery and Inn. Today this building contains paintings done by Dachau artists in the late 19th century and around the turn of the century. These are traditional paintings that show the Dachau landscape which attracted so many painters that the town became known as an important artist's colony.

In the last days of World War II, when the people of Dachau realized that American troops would soon be invading their town, an uprising was planned to prevent the German SS soldiers from defending the town. The residents did not want their beautiful historic buildings to be destroyed in a useless defense of the town. A group of Dachau citizens joined forces with some escaped prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp and fought a pitched battle with SS soldiers in the town on April 28, 1945, the day before the American Seventh Army arrived. Seven men were killed in the fighting, three of the escaped prisoners and four residents of the town. Six of their bodies were left in front of the bank building by the SS as a warning.

On September 14, 1947, the Dachau branch of the Association of Victims of Nazi Persecution placed a commemorative plaque on the bank building, just to the left of the door, as you can see in the photograph above. The photograph below shows a closeup of the plaque. The names of the heroes on the plaque are Friedrich Dürr, Anton Hackl, Erich Hubmann, Anton Hechtl, Hans Pfügler, and Lorenz Sherer. Dürr, Hackl and Hubmann were escaped prisoners from the Dachau concentration camp. All six of the men whose names are on the plaque are buried together in the town cemetery, called the Waldfriedhof, along with Anton Decker who also died in the fighting that day.

 

Zieglerbräu Brewery and Inn

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