We finally went to Dachau yesterday. We'd been waiting for some decent weather- it was about 50 degrees and sunny, but there was still a bit of blustery cold wind blowing. When we were on the way there, I thought I might be affected by so much death and evil- on an emotional level, and perhaps even on a visceral "I-want-to-kick-somebody's-tail-for-this" kind of level. When I came away from it, both Kristin and I agreed-it wasn't as much of an impact as we expected. To explain a bit, it's hard to imagine it all. While there are two reconstructed prisoner's barracks, only the foundations remain of the 30 other barracks. The site was heavily used, even after the war, to house prisoners and refugees, up until the 1960's when an international movement to have it dedicated as a memorial site finally gained some traction. The German government resisted a bit and finally relented, but made a bit of a compromise: the former SS camp directly adjacent to the prisoner's camp is still being used by the Bavarian riot police. Because of this, it's hard to get the true scale of the camp, and fit it into it's proper place within the local military structure at the time. It's also hard to make the human connection. There's very little left of anything personal at the camp- very few bowls, or letters, or eyeglasses, or books- something that might connect the observer to the owner through the years. It's also hard to get a scale of the numbers of people who were killed or died. When you step into a cemetery like the one we saw when we visited the American War cemetery in Luxembourg, you get an immediate sense of the massive loss of humanity, because there are grave markers you can count and see. At Dachau, where most of the dead were cremated, there is but one grave to visit, honoring all those killed- known and unknown.
How a prisoner would enter the prison: Get off the train car at the landing outside. (Just a few pieces of track and a spalled concrete landing remain) Turn, and see the gate house in front of you.
As you walked through, you might have noticed the imposing guardtowers. Coupled with a trench, electric fence, a wall topped with barbed wire, and a row of trip barbed wire, you realize escape is impossible. The guards were trained to shoot anyone who stepped near the perimeter.
Reconstructed barracks, much as they looked during WWII. They were designed to be just like military barracks, and run as such, too. The differences were the massive and chronic overcrowding and extremely harsh punishments for cleanliness infractions. No one could wear their shoes inside- the rough-cut wooden floors were to be kept to a polished shine.
Think outside the "1 person to a bed" thought you have right now. Imagine fitting 5 people, instead. Prisoners slept on straw mattresses.
These sinks and toilets were all that were available for up to 1000 people to use.
Hitler established Dachau just a few months after he gained office. To keep his grip on power firm, he started rounding up political opponents and to start his ethnic cleansing, Jews. The site of Dachau was chosen because it was a former ammunition factory. Dachau was the very first and (as thought by the Nazis,) the 'best' of them. All concentration camps were to follow the pattern and example Dachau set early in Hitler's reign, right down to the layout of the camp. Around 200,000 prisoners are thought to have been kept at Dachau, with an estimated 25,000 dying there, perhaps more. It is thought the prison population swelled towards the end of the war to about 30,000, as the Nazis evacuated the camps near the front as the Allies advanced. The camp was only designed for 6,000. When Dachau was liberated by the Americans, (it was one of the very first) much effort was made to film and document the atrocities, and the level of depravity the Nazis had reached. The shocked and angry American leadership even forced the local townfolk to march through the camp and observe the emaciated prisoners and stacks of corpses. There was very little believing that the town didn't know what was going on. What probably happened, though, is that they were too frightened to speak out, lest they be interred there, too. The SS wasn't an organization to point fingers at and still hope to retain your liberty.
Above are the first crematorium built at the site and the expanded crematorium. These ovens burned night and day until the Nazis ran out of coal at the end of the war. It was here in front of the ovens that most of the hangings took place.
Today it is possible to walk through the gas chambers. Although they were probably not used at Dachau, simply walking through the gas chambers is horrifying.
As a Christian, I often hear people talk angrily about the church's collusion with the Nazis during the war, and I've heard people use that as an excuse to not go to church, or even practice a religion. Dachau bears another kind of witness: Some of Hitler's first prisoners at Dachau, the ones he found the most threatening to his regime, were Christian. Dachau was the foremost Christian prison camp- over 3000 Christian clergy, most of them Catholic, were kept there. On the grounds now there are memorial chapels for the Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, and Russian Orthodox faiths.
The Catholic and Russian Orthodox memorials
The Protestant and Jewish memorials
The museum does well with a depiction of almost every aspect of the camp- the reasons for its founding, the conditions throughout its existence, groups targeted for imprisonment, daily routines, human experiments, torture, and brutal discipline. There was a map of Northwestern Europe that had a shockingly large amount of prison sites marked on it. I didn't know that each main prison camp like Dachau had a series of much smaller satellite camps of varying sizes. The numbers I gave above only deal with the main camp. The figures (though I don't have them) are far worse when the smaller camps are considered.
The above mentioned map of consentration camps in Europe
Never Again.
No comments:
Post a Comment