June 4
Warning: sad and a little bit graphic. But mostly just sad.
I wanted to separate this post out because the great, happy, wonderful feeling we had enjoying the city of Munich stands in stark contrast to that of our feelings at Dachau concentration camp. It was actually a bizarre shift in mood that was made a bit easier by the extra processing time I allocated us by taking the wrong trains (both going and returning from Dachau).
Once we finally arrived into town, we took the local bus to the Dachau memorial.
Dachau was the first Nazi concentration camp opened in Germany, originally intended to hold political prisoners and later to included the imprisonment of Jews, German and Austrian criminals, Communists, Catholics, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, Romas, and eventually foreign nationals from countries that Germany invaded. The concentration camp was opened in 1933 on an abandoned munitions factory about 10 miles outside of the town of Dachau.
Dachau became the concentration camp that other camps were based off because of the incredible brutality that was used against its prisoners. Other Nazis were sent to Dachau to learn their tactics which included brutal beatings, floggings, tree or pole hangings, standing at attention for extremely long periods, and cruel medical experiments on both healthy and sick prisoners. On top of this was extreme humiliation, starvation and deplorable living conditions.
A recreation of a bunk room:
Nazis reopened the munitions factory and the prisoners were to serve as forced labor in the factory or in the building and expansion of the camp.
31,951 documented people were reported killed at Dachau, but many thousands more deaths were undocumented.
Arriving into the camp, you walk through a gate with the words “Arbeit Macht Frei” which translates to “Work will make you free”. This was Nazi propaganda which tried to trivialize the camps as labor and re-education camps instead of the brutal death camps that they actually were.
I don’t think that anyone “likes” going to a concentration camp. Just like I doubt any of you “like” reading this post. Just like I wish I wasn’t writing this post. We didn’t like going there. We could have just hung out in Munich, enjoying the sights, having another beer. But I knew that I wanted to visit a concentration camp while we were in Germany and once Sarah mentioned that she was interested, we committed. It was awful.
The memorial did a really good job of showing the size, scale and depth of horrors committed while infusing enough personal stories of prisoners to avoid glossing over the deaths as happening to one group of people or even just lumping it into one big terrible thing that happened. This was millions of terrible things that happened to hundreds of thousands of people and not by just one or two people. It was done by a lot of people while even more stood by and did nothing to help. And I think we mostly know that. But the reason why we still need to go see these things first hand and continue to tell these stories is so history doesn’t repeat itself.
What shook me is that the racist propaganda that is documented at this memorial is not that dissimilar from some of the racist things that are being said about immigrants around the world today.
The idea that it is easier to cage people if you dehumanize them and call them “animals” is the way that normal Germans were able to accept the horrible things that were going on in their backyards. What is wrong with caging an animal? A criminal? We have to be reminded about the way that things escalated in the 1930s and keep an eye on the way that immigrants and unprotected people are treated and talked about in our world today.
US forces liberated Dachau on April 29, 1945. More than 30,000 prisoners were freed but could not leave the camp immediately because of an epidemic of black typhus among the prisoners. Of those liberated, another 5,000 were too sick and died before actually leaving Dachau. Here is a picture taken of prisoners on the day of liberation:
US troops forced all residents from town to enter the camp to see the conditions and help bury the dead. Most local residents claimed no knowledge of the activities at the camp, but many benefited financially from the camp. Here is some insight into the economic effect of the camp on the town.
The below was a picture of the residents being forced to see the piles of bodies that were waiting to be cremated when the US forces arrived.
There are several memorials built on the property. The below reads: “May the example of those who were exterminated here between 1933-1945 because they resisted nazism help to unite the living for the defence of peace and freedom and in respect for their fellow man”.
This memorial called attention to all of the different types of prisoners at Dachau. Political prisoners wore red badges, professional criminals wore green, “work-shy and asocial” wore black, Jehovah’s Witnesses wore violet, homosexuals wore pink, emigrants wore blue, Jews wore yellow combined with another color, among other classifications.
There is a Catholic chapel on site,
a Protestant chapel,
and a Jewish memorial.
Michael expressed concern that the Catholic chapel is in the center of the three religious buildings instead of the Jewish memorial.
In several languages below, it is written: Here in Dachau every third victim was a Pole + One of every two Polish priests was martyred + Their holy memory is venerated by their fellow prisoners of the Polish clergy.
Off to the side from the other religious memorials is a Russian Orthodox chapel.
We weren’t able to enter, but you could see inside to this mural of Jesus leading the prisoners out of Dachau.
Also there is a Carmelite Convent on-site. One of the guard towers has been remodeled as the entrance of the convent.
There were many stories and visuals from this visit that just devastated me and will likely haunt me for a long time. However, I am encouraged by the number of school children that were visiting. Yes, some of them were goofing off and could have used a mean glance from an adult. But the fact that these visits are being done and that kids are getting this information in such raw form makes me hopeful that future generations will not forgot.
