It’s not like it’s Auschwitz.
I remember thinking that as I embarked on my trip to Dachau Concentration Camp in late April 2023. I mean, yeah, the Nazis did horrible things here too, I’m sure (I didn’t actually know what had happened at Dachau), but still…it wasn’t Auschwitz.
No one could have prepared me for what I saw, which was just a shadow of its previous brutal self, curated as a museum with its clean walls and pleasant smell. It must have been a far cry from what it had been by April 1945. Most of the buildings no longer exist, and the horror of those days has been long replaced by birds chirping in trees near the parade ground.
Yet the curators did a good job of showing the historical reality that made Dachau the dark blotch on Germany’s history that it is. Himmler had made it his prototype in 1933, shortly after the Nazi party came to power. Under his guidance, a level of brutality unmeasured by most civilizations in human history displaced any effort of real rehabilitation. Most of the early prisoners were political opponents. Seldom did they return to German society.
Then came the early victories in Poland and the annexation of Czechoslovakia. This only served to swell the ranks of Dachau’s prisoner population. In the peak of Dachau’s operations, some 60,000 persons were housed there at any given time. Many would not leave.
The ways they died are legion. Surely their blood calls out to God from the ground even now. As I toured the grounds, I was struck over and over again at how brutal humanity could be against those already made helpless. Whether dead from gunshot at a makeshift shooting range, cremated in ovens, shot attempting to escape, starvation, or from a disease, they all died without dignity under the oppressive rule of an evil authority.
I learned that several prisoners died from rushing the fence. They knew they would not escape. That was never the aim. They simply wanted to end their own suffering. I stood along part of the old fence, near a guard tower, and tried to wish they hadn’t done that. I couldn’t. I probably would have too. Or at least have considered it. Horror and brutality does something to a person. Who am I to judge someone in such agony?
I cried a little reading about the liberation, how US Soldiers liberated the camp and took out their anger on some SS men nearby. It was wrong, as far as rules of war went, but then again, I had a hard time judging them in my spirit. Then I read about how Soldiers literally killed some of the prisoners with kindness, feeding them more than they could handle. Their bodies, in shock, couldn’t process the food.
And I’d been blind to it, dreaming instead of my heroic grandfathers who flew in B-26 Marauders and B-24 Liberators into the air over France and Germany. They probably didn’t know much about Dachau either. In my childhood daydreams, I would pretend I was a pilot over Germany in 1944, never once thinking about Dachau. I only knew of Auschwitz because it was more famous for the murder of so many Jews. Even then, my knowledge went only so deep.
When I was a child, that was perhaps understandable. But as an adult, it is a travesty. I have no excuse to be in Dachau as clueless as I was in April. What else was I blind to? If I’d been in such denial about the horrors of Dachau, what else was I in denial about? Was I even fully cognizant about the gruesome history in my own country?
I wanted to be fair to myself. No one can know the width and depth of history. Even those who study it for their vocation focus on one general area (or even a specialized one). The scope of human history is too broad. But that doesn’t give me permission to be clueless about history either. Like always, there’s a balance, and I want to find it. I hope you do too.
Until next time…
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